Unified Communications Featured Article

Whatever Happened to Cloud First?

By Paula Bernier
Executive Editor, TMC

The U.S. government has been working on its cloud migration for several years now. It hasn’t achieved its cloud adoption targets. But several federal agencies have reported success with strategies involving the adoption of cloud-based CRM, email, and/or hosting solutions.

Recently the Trump administration revisited the government’s Cloud First effort. They renamed it Cloud Smart. And they used that as an opportunity to discuss the government’s strategy “to migrate to a safe and secure cloud infrastructure.”

Shortly after the government talked about that in September, Enterprise Information Services Inc. announced it was among the winners of a contract related a $12.1 billion government modernization effort. And companies like ULTATEL began emphasizing the value propositions of their cloud-based solutions (in this case unified communications and VoIP) for government.

Such cloud communications solutions can deliver significant upfront and operational cost savings as compared to premises-based PBX (News - Alert) systems, noted ULTATEL CEO Amr Ibrahim. “The federal government has already improved countless workers’ lives and its quality of service by being a telecommuting early adopter,” he added. “VoIP and unified communications offer the opportunity to build on that success and bring our federal agencies into a faster, more secure, and more reliable telecom era.”

FedScoop recently published the Federal Cloud Readiness Report. It was

sponsored by VMware, Intel (News - Alert), and Carahsoft. The report is based on responses from 150 prequalified senior federal government IT decision makers at civilian agencies.

The FedScoop report suggests that six in 10 federal IT executives see cloud computing as vital to improving mission-critical services. And it indicates that 60 percent of federal IT leaders surveyed report that most of their agency’s IT spending over the next three years will go toward cloud.

But the Federal Times last year noted “government has been slow to move toward the cloud.” It references a Government Business Council survey suggesting just 19 percent of respondents extensively use or are testing cloud applications. And 81 percent said they hadn’t at that point launched significant cloud migration efforts.