White House Maps and the Federal Cloud

The current administration of the US Government has been increasingly looking at ways to both reduce costs as well as leverage more appropriate technology in order to provide services. The “Federal Cloud” is an initiative to adopt more cost-effective solutions that don’t require huge infrastructure costs for the government to build and maintain.

Steven VanRoekel, the new US Federal Chief Information Officer, published an article on the White House blog discussing the US Governments efforts to optimize their data center overhead and move more services to hosted services.

“agencies are on track to save taxpayers billions of dollars by cutting spending on wasteful, underutilized hardware, software and operations as well as enhance our cybersecurity; shrink our energy and real estate footprints; and take advantage of transformational technologies like cloud computing to make government work better for our nation’s families.”

A cloud hosted GeoCommons map is used to geographically visualize the national extent of the data centers that are being consolidated or closed. An elegant move by the US Government to demonstrate moving to the cloud by using the cloud in the discussion itself. You can also view the source map to access the underlying data in a variety of open formats.

We’re proud that GeoIQ is used across several government agencies and NGO’s to make it easier than ever to share data and create informative analyses. If you have more examples of the government using GeoCommons or any other great cloud solutions, we’d love to hear about them.