Federal CIO Vivek Kundra says government will slash IT budgets where projects aren't working, while spending more on innovation.
By J. Nicholas Hoover, InformationWeek
The President's fiscal 2012 IT budget focuses on cutting what the government can't afford while still investing in game-changing technologies, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said today on a call with reporters.
Overall, the federal IT budget will go up by 1.3% to $79.5 billion, but that represents relatively flat spending compared to IT budget increases under the Bush administration.
On one hand, the budget begins a multi-year shift toward eliminating more than 800 federal data centers and eventually moving as much as $20 billion in IT spending to the cloud via data center consolidation and a cloud-first budgeting policy. It also reflects savings from rigorous statistics-based IT project reviews put in place last year. On the other hand, the government is spending significantly more money this year on cybersecurity and certain special projects like the FAA's NextGen air traffic control system.
While cloud computing is called out mostly in general terms in the President's budget and agencies' budgets, Kundra noted that cloud savings could be substantial, adding that the General Services Administration and Department of Agriculture would each save millions by moving to cloud email and collaboration services.
As part of the recently-released federal cloud strategy, agencies have committed to moving 72 total services to the cloud, Kundra said. He predicted that agencies' collaboration services will move to the cloud first, followed by workflow, infrastructure, business intelligence, and even security management.
