In his latest Chairman's Corner, Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney announced that Recovery.gov is now the first "government-wide" cloud computing system. Sounds impressive, right? Well, sort of. Essentially, this means that Recovery.gov, which used to be housed on servers operated by the Board and used solely for that purpose, is now hosted on "cloud" servers run by Amazon.com.

From the user side of things, there won't really be any difference (indeed, the changeover actually happened on April 26). Recovery.gov will operate just like it always has. The main benefit of moving to the cloud is better resource allocation on the backend of things. To quote Wikipedia, with cloud computing:

sharing "perishable and intangible" computing power among multiple tenants can improve utilization rates, as servers are not unnecessarily left idle (which can reduce costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development). A side-effect of this approach is that overall computer usage rises dramatically, as customers do not have to engineer for peak load limits.

In other words, the Board will be saving a fair amount of money, as they don't have to be owning and running the servers necessary to meet the highest conceivable demand. According to Devaney, by moving to the cloud the Board will be saving about $750,000 dollars over the next year or so, and redirecting about $1 million worth of equipment to other uses, such as waste, fraud, and abuse detection.

But moving to cloud computing doesn't change much from a transparency side of things. It isn't a step towards multi-tier reporting, it doesn't improve data quality, and it doesn't make it easier to search through Recovery.gov. So while it's great the Board's saving money, and the government's starting to utilize new technology, new technology can't fix every problem. Some problems simply require better utilization of the technology you have.

For more on Recovery.gov's move to the cloud, check out this blog post by Obama's Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra.

Image by Flickr user kevindooley used under a Creative Commons license.