Cloud in Local Government?

I recently attended a local government seminar in which multiple vendors had the opportunity to talk about their newest products and services. I was not surprised to see how many were presenting on their "flavor" of cloud and how it could benefit local government. With all the variations of user portals, hybrid vs private vs public and data center tier levels, I also wasn't surprised to see the look of confusion on the faces of many attendees. What does continue to surprise me is how complicated the IT industry makes "cloud" appear to be. Therefore, I decided to create a list of very basic questions that a city, county or school district can ask themselves to determine if they should take a closer look at public cloud as a potential solution.

1. Do all of your applications need to run 24/7/365? - If you answered "no" to this you need to take a closer look at public cloud. With public cloud you have the ability to automatically set your infrastructure to turn itself off at a specific time and turn itself back on at a specific time - maybe during the hours of 7 PM to 6 AM. That's roughly 4,015 hours per year you're not maintaining unutilized infrastructure!
2. Do you have seasonal applications, such as moodle, that are only used during the school year? - Instead of maintaing the server(s) year round, why not put this application on a public cloud platform and pay for the infrastructure when you need it?
3. Do you have Shadow IT? - The day of swiping a credit card and spinning up a server is upon us. This is great, and yet not so great, at the same time. Shadow IT can be avoided by utilizing a vendor that provides a single public cloud portal in which you can assign sub-accounts to any department that needs resources and be able to easily track what's being spent, who spent it and what it's being spent on.

These are just a few basic questions to ask yourself as you look at cloud.