Dive Brief:

• The Government Accountability Office issued a report yesterday saying that some of the federal government’s efforts to reduce IT costs appear to be working, CIO reports.
• Four agencies - the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department and the Social Security Administration -- accounted for about 70% of the savings.
• The federal government normally budgets about $80 billion annually for IT.

Dive Insight:

It’s been five years since the federal government began pushing agencies to reduce IT costs through data center consolidations, shared services and cloud computing. The new GAO report found that these efforts have saved the U.S. about $3.6 billion in IT costs so far.

Data center consolidations are responsible for about half of those cost reductions, the report found. Savings were also generated based on response to the government’s "cloud first" push.

However, the report also found that most agencies do not fully meet OMB's requirements to submit reinvestment plan information. Of the 27 agencies required to submit such plans, only five had done so thus far.

The report is good news for skeptics of cloud computing and other federal IT cost-reduction strategies.
Late last month, the FCC, one of the federal agencies leading the way in cloud computing, said it expects to be “100 percent cloud” by the end of fiscal 2017. The agency will exclusively use platform- and software-as-a-service offerings. The move to cloud is expected to create substantial savings for the agency. Already, the FCC rolled out a software-as-a-service public consumer help desk that was one-sixth the price of completng the same solution on premise.