White House to save $750,000 with cloud computing

Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has announced a change to the White House’s Recovery.gov website that will save the government some $750,000 USD. What did it do, cut half the site’s staff and lease out excess server space? No, the feds simply switched the site to cloud computing.

The change will save the White House $334,000 in 2010 alone. After much searching, Kundra’s team decided to host with Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service. Other government agencies have begun preliminary tests with the cloud, but Recovery.gov is one of the first federal sites to move to cloud hosting.

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