Obama's US$79 billion tech plan may favor Web programs

The government wants to put data such as health-care pricing information on Internet-based systems as they grow more secure, the U.S. chief information officer said in an interview this week. The U.S. can cut costs by outsourcing that work, said Kundra, who has overseen the federal technology budget since U.S. President Barack Obama appointed him last year.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. are all offering more databases and programs online, allowing customers to curb storage costs. Sharing software and data that way would shrink U.S. storage needs, helping to cut expenses after previous governments spent more than US$500 billion on data centers and other technology initiatives in the past decade, Kundra said.

“It's mind-boggling,” said Kundra, a New Delhi native who previously managed information technology for the District of Columbia. “It costs a fortune, it's duplicative and it's an energy hog.”

The model Kundra is looking at is known as cloud computing, where users go through the Web to access computers, applications and data instead of through their own servers. He declined to say which companies are best fit to operate government clouds. He noted that Google and Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft have introduced government-focused clouds in the past few months.

Global spending on cloud computing may top US$44 billion in 2013, according to research firm IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.

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