Trump Administration: Cloud Boosts Productivity
Agencies that maintain legacy collaboration systems and do not move to the cloud are paying a hidden tax on their productivity that wastes time and money, the White House says.
The White House wants more agencies to move their applications to the cloud and claims that failing to do so would be a detriment to productivity.
“Too few federal agencies have basic collaboration tools such as real-time document sharing or videoconferencing,” documentation accompanying the president’s 2018 budget request states. “In many cases, the tools being used by agencies are more than a decade old and run on legacy systems with growing maintenance costs. This situation is a hidden tax on productivity: It wastes time, creates missed opportunities, and slows coordination and creativity.”
Spending on legacy infrastructure now makes up about 70.3 percent of federal IT spending, up from 68 percent three years ago, the budget notes.
Instead, the Trump administration points to agencies, such as the Justice Department, that have turned to cloud-based collaboration solutions and discovered significant savings, ranging from $500,000 to $10 million per year.
“The majority of agencies who moved to cloud-based collaboration solutions experienced cost savings after just a few years of investment,” the White House document reads.
The budget proposal also builds on a May 2017 executive order related to cybersecurity that states that agency leaders should show preference in their architecture for the cloud and shared IT services, such as email.