Global Government Cloud Market to Grow at 6.2 Percent CAGR

Amazon, Google, IBM (News - Alert), Microsoft and Salesforce.com dominate the global government cloud computing market, which is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.2 percent through 2016, according to a recent TechNavio study.

With emerging technologies and tightening budgets, the cloud is quickly gaining traction in the public sector as a savvy IT approach. TechNavio analysts said growth in this sector is attributed to the need for reducing total cost of ownership, but security concerns could hold back development in this market.

“The global government cloud computing market has also been witnessing the emerging hybrid approach to cloud solutions,” according to TechNavio’s report, the Global Government Cloud Computing Market 2012-2016. “However, increasing concern about data security could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.”

Other cloud vendors dominating the government sector include: Cisco Systems, NetSuite, Oracle (News - Alert), Rackspace, Verizon Communications Inc., VMware Inc., AT&T, CA Technologies, Inc. and Infor Global Solutions.

In related news, more than two years after commencing its push toward enterprise e-mail, the U.S. Department of Defense now has one million users on a consolidated private cloud e-mail platform, MSP Today reported.

The milestone means that DOD Enterprise Email (DEE) is now one of the largest independent e-mail systems in the world.

Enterprise services reduce costs by consolidating system hardware requirements and maintenance, eliminating unnecessary and inefficient administration and resource allocation, which means the military services and defense organizations using enterprise services can save money in IT services to preserve resources for their primary mission – according to Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, director of Defense Information Systems Agency (News - Alert) (DISA).

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, 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.