GSA CIO says move to cloud has achieved 300% decrease in time-to-value on tech projects

The adoption of cloud technology has resulted in a 300% reduction in time-to-value on technology projects at certain GSA departments, according to the agency’s chief information officer.

Speaking Thursday at the Nutanix Cloud Together Summit, David Shive said the increase in pace of realized return on investment was one of three benefits spurring adoption of cloud hosting services at the agency.

“The cost differential [between cloud and self-hosted services] is pretty flat, but the decrease in time-to-value represents a huge increase in business value,” Shive said.

Time-to-value is a metric that measures the amount of time it takes customers to obtain value from a certain product or service. 

In addition to time-to-value improvements, velocity of service and an increase in service end-quality are two further benefits that have led to widespread adoption of the technology at the agency, according to Shive.

GSA approaches each new technology project with a cloud-first attitude, and it resorts to on-prem hosting only where necessary, he noted.

Speaking alongside Shive at the summit, Department of Energy Chief Information Officer Ann Dunkin said the ability of cloud hosting technology to scale at speed was another factor driving adoption at her agency.

Dunkin gave the example of the Energy Information Administration, which experiences sudden spikes in website traffic at certain times each year.

“They [the EIA] are currently on-premise, but are looking at how they get into the cloud, because once a year they get a huge hit on their data center [from website traffic],” she said.