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State of Public Sector Cloud Computing USA.gov
Case Study: General Services Administration (Office of Citizen Services) – USA.gov
Reducing costs and improving service by moving USA.gov to a cloud-based hosting environment
Vivek Kundra, U.S. Chief Information Officer
As the Federal Government’s primary information portal, USA.gov, presents the American people with a vast body of information and resources including topics like benefits and grants, taxes, jobs, education, health, voting, technology, and business and nonprofit guides.
As the Federal Government encourages citizens to become more involved and active with local, state, and federal politics, key sites like USA.gov see vastly increasing and decreasing website traffic as key issues are debated in the national public forum, natural disasters come and go, and voting season approaches. These spikes in traffic made a cloud computing-based solution very attractive, as a cloud infrastructure is much better able to deal with on-demand scalability than most traditional IT infrastructures. This increased flexibility positions USA.gov to better serve emerging needs.
By moving to Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud service, the General Services Administration (GSA) reduced site upgrade time from nine months (including procurement) to a maximum of one day. Monthly downtime moved from roughly two hours with the traditional hosting setup to near zero with the cloud solution (99.9 percent availability). With its legacy setup, GSA paid $2.35 million annually for USA.gov, including total hardware refresh and software relicensing costs of $2 million, in addition to personnel costs of $350,000. By moving to a cloud service, GSA now pays an annual total of $650,000 for USA.gov and all associated costs, a costs savings of $1.7 million, or 72 percent. 1
1 General Services Administration, May 2010.
