The US federal government was an early adopter of cloud computing and has instructed its agencies to use a “cloud-first” approach to new applications since 2010. The federal government has seen a big benefit of shifting to the cloud, with one program reporting savings of $40 million in the last two years.
State government and local governments are also making the switch, adopting tools like Google Apps for their email, calendar, and document storage switches. For example, the state of Wyoming was the first to move all 10,000 of their employees to using Google Apps, which operate in the cloud.
As a result of increased comfort with cloud technology, a new survey shows that 75% of federal cloud users say they want to move more services to the cloud, but are concerned about retaining control over their data. That’s an important concern – all cloud user agreements should explicitly outlines who owns and controls the data.
