Three out of four government IT professionals use open source technology for their respective agency’s on-premises, scalable cloud infrastructure services, according to a new survey by Scoop News Group, a government IT media company.
Most those surveyed were favorable about the costs, security and ease of the popular open source software platform, OpenStack. The survey also identified a greater commitment towards technologies that permit more rapid, iterative development in the modernization of government technologies.
Highlights of The Survey Include:
- 7 in 10 government respondents said their agencies are using, planning or considering adopting agile software development methods.
- Among federal and state government respondents who said their agencies aren’t currently using cloud services, two-thirds said their agencies plan to use them in the next 12 to 24 months.
- Among the top uses of cloud services, 61 percent of respondents say their primary use for the cloud is computing, followed by email (58 percent), storage (55 percent), application development (50 percent) and back up (36 percent).
The study explored the respondents’ perceptions about OpenStack, which controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter, compared to using proprietary cloud software and found the following:
- 9 in 10 believe it is no more expensive, and half belief it less expensive to deploy.
- 8 in 10 believe it is as fast or faster to deploy.
- 3 in 4 believe it is as secure or more secure.
- 7 in 10 believe it as resilient or more resilient in handling operating faults.
- 5 in 10 believe it makes overall development costs easier to control.
Respondents also identified a number of obstacles to adopting OpenStack in their organizations. The lack of staff and internal skills were cited most often (6 in 10 respondents), while others (more than one-third) expressed concerns about the benefits outweighing deployment costs and of OpenStack meeting agency requirements.
The survey reflects the views of approximately 300 government IT professionals, with 77 percent working in federal and state agencies and the balance employed at industry firms working in the government IT community.
