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Leveraging a commercial cloud computing provider to ensure accessibility, security and scalability

Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer

Launched in February of 2009 after the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act), Recovery.gov is designed to “foster greater accountability in the use of funds made available by this Act.” The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board created this public-facing site to allow citizens to track how stimulus funds are spent. The site includes a number of tools including graphs, charts, and maps which are continuously updated and refined to properly reflect stimulus spending. As such, a Government-wide system relies on an agile and substantial infrastructure to ensure that information is accessible, secure, and easy to update with current information.

On April 26, 2010, Recovery.gov became the first Government-wide system to migrate to a cloud-based environment. The Amazon EC2 infrastructure will provide added security, as the vendor’s security will supplement existing measures previously put in place by the Board. The elastic nature of this commercial cloud system means that Recovery.gov is a fully scalable site, ready to handle spikes in usage as needed. In-house personnel currently dedicated to management of the site’s associated data center and corresponding hardware will be able to redirect their resources to oversight and fraud detection.

Moving Recovery.gov to the cloud means a projected cost savings of $334,800 in FY 2010 and $420,000 in FY 2011. This represents 4 percent of the Board’s $18 million total budget provided by Congress. Additionally, the Board plans to reallocate more than $1 million worth of hardware and software to its accountability mission to help identify fraud, waste, and abuse. Relocating Recovery.gov to the cloud ensures nearly 100 percent uptime and the ability to continuously backup site information. By implementing cloud technologies, the Board better meets its obligations laid out under Section 1526 of the Recovery Act, and is able to refocus efforts on its mission of transparency and accountability.