Accenture report shows slow cloud adoption

Despite the federal Cloud First mandate, only 10 percent of agencies have migrated more than one half of their IT portfolios to the cloud, according to new research from Accenture Federal Services.

The Cloud First strategy required agencies to evaluate cloud options before making new IT investments, but a GAO report shows that of 20 cloud migration plans submitted by agencies, only one was completed, and only 10 percent of agencies have migrated more than half of their IT portfolio, Accenture reported.

The report, called “The Road Ahead: 3 Years After Cloud First,” assessed the perceptions, attitudes and experiences of 286 federal executives regarding cloud services and found:

• 69 percent said the main inhibitors to cloud adoption include lack of necessary staffing.
• 31 percent said at least one additional employee would need to be hired.
• 45 percent said that training is necessary to develop the needed skills, estimating the cost of such training to be between $25,000 and $50,000.
• 31 percent said that the reason why agencies have not adopted cloud sooner is because of lengthy procurement processes.