GiGi Schumm,
Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector, Symantec Corp.

Cost savings, plus improvements in their operational flexibility and transparency are the most obvious right now.

Cost savings is currently the biggest driver for cloud computing, by far. Data center consolidation and the ability to use virtualization, data de-duplication and shared services all represent big opportunities to reduce costs. Flexibility allows agencies to support new initiatives and to scale efforts very quickly, with the recent cash-for-clunkers car buying program a good example of that. And flexibility speaks to government employees and citizens having access to better quality data along with the interoperability of that data, and that’s something that the Obama Administration is pushing for.

Tom Ruff,
Vice President, Public Sector, Akamai Technologies, Inc.

There are many key benefits for federal agencies to deploy cloud solutions. As one of the hottest concepts in IT today, cloud computing proposes to transform the way IT is consumed and managed, with promises of improved cost efficiencies, accelerated innovation, faster time-to-market, and the ability to scale applications on demand.

With that said, most cloud computing services are accessed over the Internet, and thus fundamentally rely on an inherently unpredictable and insecure medium. Therefore, in order for agencies to realize the full potential of their cloud computing initiatives, they will need to overcome the performance, reliability, and scalability challenges the Internet presents.

Richard W. Johnson,
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions

Total cost of ownership is obviously the big one. There’s also the benefit the cloud provides for green IT, with the reduction in the size of government IT infrastructures. And some of the work we are doing with our partners in the Cloud Security Alliance, and the Lockheed Martin Cyber Security Alliance point to improved data security.

One of the interesting things is that you can only protect what you know you have, and one of the advantages of cloud computing is that you know all of the applications you have, all of the critical systems, and all of the platforms. You know everything that’s in your cloud because you are charging for it. And, when you know what you have in your cloud, you have the ability to defend it through a continuous process that’s much easier and, at the end of the day, provides for a much more effective security posture.