At The Tower Club on September 14th, Bajinder Paul, Deputy Associate Administrator of Citizen Services and Innovative Technology at General Services Administration (GSA), spoke to 20 executives at a breakfast roundtable hosted by WashingtonExec. The event itself was sponsored by Attain, a leading public sector services company.
Paul spoke about the future of government IT for small businesses and entrepreneurs; expectedly cloud computing was first on his list.
Out of the federal government’s 80 billion dollar IT budget, “Cloud computing will be a 20 billion dollar space by 2015, everyone, private and public, should be moving towards that level of efficiency,” said Paul. “The government can be the catalyst for change,” further stating that his organization has been working to drive that change. “The question now is, can we break those Silos?,” asked Paul.
Paul said that he believes cloud computing is an important aspect for federal IT modernization, but reminded participants that it is not the end-all-be-all solution. Getting into specifics, “The government is moving away from Asset -management to services-management… Cloud is not the silver bullet, but it will be a big part in the overall execution of an agency’s IT Strategic goals,” stated Paul.
When an attendee brought up her belief that historically once a buzzword is no longer is a buzzword, that this is the time when the modernization will be truly effective, Paul agreed. “Cloud computing has been going on for many years, now there is an astonishing mandate.” He cited Vivek Kundra’s 25 Point IT Reform Plan as just one example.
Paul added that there are other important technologies that will attribute to government efficiency, including mobile. Paul said, “It is going to be beyond the blackberry. The concept is there, the door is wide open. Mobile computing will be based on secure access to information anytime, anyplace on any platform.”