Many agencies have learned that cloud migration is a good thing for their tech infrastructure, but quantifying that is proving to be difficult. Federal institutions currently do not keep track of their cloud spending, and are unable to provide it when asked. Danny Werfel, director at the Boston Consulting Group, says that the need to maintain that data is growing.
“Every time they are spending money, they are collecting information on what they are spending on. If they’re not collecting information in a way to say ‘Okay, when we made this payment, we made it for this type of technology services.’ If they are not tracking that consistently across the agency, then they are not building this record of spend,” Werfel said. “This is something that the government and OMB has been dealing with for many, many years. Going back to the Transparency Act, the law that created USASpending, that was a piece of legislation that said tell us federal agencies exactly where your money is being spent. Which grantees and which contractors are receiving all the dollars? Even back then, government agencies were not equipped to answer those basic questions.”
