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"It looks like The White House has copied a page from Google's playbook and is now advocating that federal agencies move to the cloud. Google has long been a proponent of business in the cloud, most recently advocating their web-based Google Apps to enterprise prospects in the \"Going Google\" campaign.\nIn an effort to reduce government operational costs and move agencies to the cloud, the White House is launching Apps.gov.  The new initiative was announced by Vivek Kundra, Federal Chief Information Officer, on The White House Blog.Apps.gov makes cloud-based IT services (which includes Google Apps) available for purchase to all federal agencies and is an all-in-one store front designed to make the purchase and adoption of cloud computing services common place.\nThe Apps.gov mall is a pretty impressive marketplace for federal cloud computing services. The modern IT store includes business applications, cloud IT services, productivity apps, and even social media apps for the extra trendy federal agencies. Interestingly enough, Google Apps are made available for purchase.  Some of the social media apps officially advocated include Disqus, Facebook, TwitVid, Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, and other recognizable social media sites consumers have already come to appreciate.\n\nThe Apps.gov Push\nThe government's move to push cloud computing in lieu of desktop software solutions is quite revolutionary. According to the blog post on Apps.gov, cloud computing should show annual savings in information technology and tax payer dollars, as the government currently spends $75 billion on IT. And, admittedly, the federal government has been behind the times, with the challenges associated with managing IT services escalating:\nHowever, federal agencies and departments encounter many difficulties in deploying new IT services and products. Procurement processes can be confusing and time-consuming. Security procedures are complex, costly, lengthy and duplicative across agencies. Our policies lag behind new trends, causing unnecessary restrictions on the use of new technology. Past practices too often resulted in inefficient use of purchased IT capabilities across the federal government. We are dedicated to addressing these barriers and to improving the way government leverages new technology.\nWith federal agencies turning to online solutions for IT services, we have to wonder if this will push more enterprise companies to do the same."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2009/09/15/government-going-google/>