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A new survey by Deloitte and the Government Business Council (GBC), a market research company specializing in governments, titled "Mastering the Migration: A Candid Survey of Federal Leaders on the State of Cloud Computing," has found that the way federal organizations migrate their data and applications to the cloud is impacting the value of such migrations.

The survey which studied the responses of 328 senior employees from major defense, government and civilian agencies, found that only 24% of the respondents believed that cloud computing had a positive impact on their organization. While only 6% of the respondents reported a negative impact, about 70% said that cloud computing had no noticeable impact or any impact on their organization.

The Obama administration had announced the cloud-first initiative in 2011. To comply with this initiative, many government organizations and agencies have moved their applications to the clouds from the government-owned data centers. But, these migrations just "lifted-and-shifted" existing applications and data to cut costs and add convenience. They did not factor in the impact of such migrations on the functionality, IT architecture and users causing the newer applications to become non-intuitive, slow to load, and more difficult to work with.

"While most respondents agree that cloud computing should provide many benefits, what we are seeing is that federal agencies that have implemented the cloud may still be working on bringing those benefits fully to fruition and/or communicating those benefits that have been achieved," says Nicholas McClusky, director of research & strategic insights, GBC.

About 41% of the respondents found that the efforts put into cloud migration by their organization were either problematic, mixed or non-existent, with less than 10% finding them successful. The study states that these inefficiencies and difficulties are due to lack of expertise/ skills, security concerns, budget constraints, apart from the inflexibility and complexity of legacy applications.

Even though top agency executives like CIOs and CFOs have shown positive interest for cloud, the findings of the survey suggest that IT leadership should also become involved during cloud migrations so that they can help leverage the value of the cloud. Success in implementing the cloud requires that the organization and its cyber practices evolve along with the IT services portfolio.

"The promise of the cloud is huge, but the journey isn't easy," says Doug Bourgeois, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP, who is also the team leader for federal technology. "Cloud value cannot be achieved through technology aloneit's about governance, security, and transformation. This report validates that support for cloud in federal agencies is growing, but perceptions of its impact vary significantly. Agencies should rethink their core development principles and strategy for migration to the cloud."

While cloud is the future for the federal agencies, institutional policies for data sharing and security should change to fit the new cloud architecture to ensure ease of operations, stability, performance and agility.

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Federal Agencies Unable to Completely Leverage Cloud Computing - Read IT Quik