U.S. agencies to spend $2.5 billion on cloud storage.

• Position: CLOUD COMPUTING - Brief article

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra said federal agencies will use the cloud to consolidate 950,000 e-mail boxes now sitting on 100 different systems.

The General Services Administration (GSA) unveiled a $2.5 billion procurement May 10 to consolidate e-mail on cloud-computing infrastructure as part of the federal government's "cloud first" mandate.

The GSA, U.S. Army, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are among the agencies that have moved or are in the process of moving e-mail systems to the cloud.

Kundra also revealed plans for several agencies to move other systems to the cloud. The U.S. Department of Justice aims to consolidate the storage systems of 250 offices that serve 18,000 U.S. attorneys to the cloud, while the USDA is looking at workflow...