(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The US Census Bureau (www.census.gov) revealed this week it has tentatively begun using cloud computing to provide a more cost-effective and rapid delivery of its services to its employees and the public, according to a report by Information Week.
The Census planning process takes 10 years to execute, however, the actual census is performed over just a few months.
The Bureau is currently in the preliminary stages of hiring and documenting about 1.4 million temporary workers, setting up 500 temporary census offices, and leveraging 170,000 partners that will help carry out the census locally.
In the end, the Bureau will mail out 600 million forms and count about 340 million people and 130 million households.
Census CIO Brian McGrath said that the Bureau will make budget cuts once the census is completed, which poses a significant challenge for the organization.
The Bureau will try to resolve this issue by introducing cost-effective practices, such as deploying a few cloud services.
McGrath said the organization is already seeing the benefits of the cloud.
For instance, when the organization ran into problems with its previously planned in-house database, it turned to Salesforce.com to store information on its 170,000 partners.
The company was able to get the database up and running in 6 weeks — a task that often takes months or even years for governments to accomplish.
The 2010 US Census website (www.census.gov/2010census) is also using cloud services, such as Akamai’s content delivery network to handle any traffic spikes.
Still in its early stages, the Census’ cloud strategy also involves a major consolidation and virtualization effort as it will eventually implement a multi-tenant architecture inside its own data center.
No related posts.
