USA.gov, the online portal for information about government, has successfully moved to cloud computing, and may be the prototype for other government sites, according to a Forrester Research study.

The study by James Staten, principal analyst at Forrester, said GSA saved plenty of money by moving USA.gov to an outside platform operated by Terremark Worldwide, an infrastructure and cloud services provider based in Miami. "GSA said this migration to the cloud has brought about a number of benefits and savings, such as avoiding idle server costs while still accommodating huge traffic spikes, acting on users' requests in real time and applying security constraints atop this platform," Staten wrote.

It's likely this study will be used as other online government services consider moving to the cloud to save money and become more efficient.

"We were in a situation where our infrastructure required a lot of staff resources to maintain it everyday," Martha Dorris, deputy associate administrator for the Office of Citizen Services, which maintains USA.gov, told nextgov.com.  "[Moving to the cloud] freed up resources, which we have used to upgrade our content management system to give us the ability to incorporate new functionalities and features on USA.gov to make the citizen's experience the best it can be."

The cost savings is significant, according to a GSA spokeswoman. The annual cloud cost for USA.gov is $800,000, compared with $2.5 million before the transition.

For more on USA.gov and cloud computing:
- check out this nextgov.com article

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