Another first for “SaaS first”

Kundra advocates “cloud-first” policy for federal IT procurement

You’ve got to love it when two of your favorite trends get together and become one—sort of like the apocryphal day when peanut butter first encountered chocolate and they together became a celebrated confection.

So it was, yesterday, when Vivek Kundra, speaking at the Brookings Institution, announced that federal IT leadership means shifting to a “cloud first” policy for new IT procurement.

A little review. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ll know that back in March we wrote about the Goldman Sachs report that was the first known articulation of the “SaaS first” approach to evaluating new IT systems. A few weeks later, we also wrote extensively about the federal budget language identifying the compelling case for cloud computing in the government. Well, we now have the top federal IT official pulling both of these concepts together in one coherent framework, with a follow-on program by NIST that will facilitate standards, security, and interoperability guidelines for the whole affair.

Kundra’s speech was titled “The Economic Gains of Cloud Computing,” and it provides a roadmap of how the federal government will move forward with its cloud computing initiative. The speech was accompanied by the release of an excellent new Brookings report, “Saving Money through Cloud Computing,” a title that leaves little to the imagination but provides an apt summary of the government case studies it outlines.

So there you have it: “SaaS first” and federal cloud adoption—two great trends that trend great together.

- Steve Van Till