Report: State, local goverments migration to cloud faster than feds’ movement

A recent InformationWeek article relayed that state and local goverments are moving to the cloud at a faster rate than the federal government.

At Microsoft’s recent Public Sector CIO Summit, where 14 new public-sector cloud deals were unveiled, a representative explained this trend.

"I think state and local may be moving a little more quickly, especially at the local government level," Gail Thomas-Flynn, Microsoft's vice president of state and local government, told InformationWeek. "There’s an opportunity to be a little more agile at the local government."

Among those local governments recently joining the cloud were Chicago, Andover, Minnesota, Virginia Beach, Virginia, and Carlsbad, California. State governments in Colorado and Idaho also recently signed up for the managed IT service. The cloud’s ability to cut costs has attracted many of these new sectors.

In the recently outlined 2012 federal budget, President Barack Obama expressed his administration’s desire to adopt the cloud in order to reduce the number of data centers the federal government currently has. However, based upon this information, the federal government has fallen behind in the migration toward the cloud.