“Cloud Computing” is a hard term to miss these days. In October, The Economist ran a feature article discussing the brewing battle to dominate cloud computing, identifying Google, Microsoft and Apple as three big players to watch.  The article points out that this new approach to computing offers benefits for both consumers and businesses, which also extends to government agencies. For business and government, “by switching to cloud-based e-mail, accounting and customer-tracking systems, firms can reduce complexity and maintenance costs, because everything runs inside a web browser.”

For some in the Public Sector, it’s easy to write-off cloud computing as not being secure enough, but even here the tide is starting turn. On October 27^th, the LA Times reported that the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to outsource the city’s email system to Google. The decision will see all of the city’s 30,000 employees using Google’s cloud service by June 2010.

As governments scramble to control costs by avoiding large capital outlays on infrastructure and applications, Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service present an interesting alternative to the status quo. By purchasing services that scale with demand, government IT departments can benefit from immediate cash savings and position themselves for long term productivity.

There certainly seems to be reason to believe that the clouds will continue to roll in. At CSDC, we’re noticing our clients are increasingly adopting a Cloud / SaaS model with AMANDA 5 taking a place in the cloud environment as a SaaS application.

Several of our clients are working to setup an internal Cloud / SaaS model and are themselves offering AMANDA application access to other departments or neighboring jurisdictions. In other cases, clients are looking to us to provide this service across their current enterprise and to future departments.

We’d love to hear your take on things. Send us your views on if and how you think Cloud Computing and SaaS might fit into your agency’s future.