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.

Photo | Flickr

Continue reading: White House to save $750,000 with cloud computing

As government agencies in the United States invest billions in new data centers and servers, federal CIO Vivek Kundra blasted them for not taking advantage of preexisting resources:

One of the most troubling aspects about the data centers is that in a lot of these cases, we’re finding that server utilization is actually around seven percent.

That’s right. Some government entities are only using about 7% of their server capacity, but are still spending large sums of money to upgrade their infrastructure. Kundra also cited other examples of government waste. For instance, the TSA wanted to spend $600,000 to set up a blog before being stopped by the CIO. Such a site could have been created for free using open source platforms like Wordpress.

Kundra hopes a switch to cloud computing will reduce waste. Last year, the General Services Administration saved some $1.7 million by using cloud computing.

Continue reading: Federal CIO: Government isn't fully utilizing its servers