Government Cloud Computing Accelerates Platform for Social Collaboration

With more Americans accessing the Internet via mobile devices rather than desktop PCs, and mobile broadband subscriptions on the rise, the U.S. government recently outlined its Digital Government Strategy, which has three main objectives.

The Digital Government Strategy sets out to accomplish three things:

1. To architect systems for interoperability and openness, modernize our content publication model, and deliver better, device-agnostic digital services at a lower cost
2. To procure and manage devices, applications and data in smart, secure and affordable ways
3. To enable the public, entrepreneurs and government programs to better leverage the wealth of federal data to pour into applications and services by ensuring that data is open and machine-readable by default.

“Technology is fundamentally transforming how we conduct our business and live our daily lives. Exponential advances in computing power, the rise of high-speed networks, and the growing mobile revolution, which puts the entire Internet at our fingertips, have unleashed new innovations, spawned new industries and reshaped existing ones,” according to the Digital Government Strategy. “The President has charged us with harnessing the power of technology to help create a 21st-century digital government – one that is efficient, effective and focused on improving the delivery of services to the American people.”

A recent whitepaper, “GovCloud 2.0,” describes how government cloud computing can provide an accelerating platform for implementing this policy, covering topics such as:

• Business Transformation: Harnessing social media and collective intelligence models to reinvent government to be more collaborative.
• Procurement Frameworks: Cloud procurement best practices, such as the U.K.’s G-Cloud.
• Digital Identity: How the identity ecosystem will secure and streamline government workflows.
• Shared services architecture: Applying cloud computing models to better share infrastructure costs between collaborating agencies.

According to the whitepaper, authored by Neil McEvoy, founder and CEO for the Cloud Best Practices Network, cloud computing represents a number of major evolutions of how software is deployed and used to deliver business processes, and how those processes can be transformed to foster an environment of collaborative social media.

In related news, the global government cloud computing market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 6.2 percent over the period 2012-2016, according to TechNavio’s analysts. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the need for reduced total cost of ownership.

The main vendors dominating the government cloud market are Amazon.com, Inc., Google, Inc., IBM (News - Alert) Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Salesforce.com, Inc.