The Economic Gains of Cloud Computing

Transcript

VIVEK KUNDRA:  When we think about information technology and the potential of cloud computing to lower the cost of government operations, drive innovation, and fundamentally change the way we deliver technology services across the board, we recognize that this is an amazing time in the very early days of cloud computing. We also recognize that the shift to cloud computing is not going to happen overnight. This is a decade-long journey. There are a number of issues that need to be addressed that I want to highlight. But if you look at the case for change, consider this, in the last decade; the United States government went from 432 data centers to over 1,100 data centers.

Now, when you think about these data centers, one of the most troubling aspects about the data centers is that in a lot of these cases, we’re finding that server utilization is actually around seven percent, that’s unacceptable when you think about all the resources that we’ve invested.

And the other thing we’re finding is that in terms of energy consumption, that the trajectory, it’s a one-way street where we continue to consume more and more energy, and these data centers tend to be energy hogs, and we need to find a fundamentally different strategy as we think about bending this curve as far as data center growth is concerned.

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