Cloud solution provides clear benefits

After talking extensively with many solution vendors working on projects in states across the union, it is clear that the country is wasting an enormous amount of money tripping over the same integration APIs and system requirements for each implementation in all 50 states.

State governments are undergoing a system upgrade called the Unemployment Insurance Modernization, for which each state is spending between $25MM to $100MM+ to install one-off systems, sometimes leveraging maintained frameworks and source code. In the end, all the solutions are one-offs that will need to undergo individual and costly upgrades again at some point in the future.

Why not have one solution hosted on a cloud environment with 50 virtualized environments? You can have data centers distributed across the U.S. to provide redundancy in the event of disaster, etc.

This one solution could potential cost only $100MM to $200MM to set up once. Each new state setup with virtualized environment could probably be done at well under $100K, and would have configurable business rules to allow each state to implement custom functionality without modifying the source code. The solution would run the same maintained source code, which receives standard maintenance upgrades.

This type of solution with virtualized environments to allow individual "instances" is very doable. As a matter of fact using this separation of source code from business rules, I designed a system for 3M in 2003 that allowed all new product introductions globally to run through one framework and source code deployed to 47 divisions and 39 countries. Cloud computing adds an additional, high-speed improvement that can support vastly more transactions and users.

Cloud computing holds many promises and this kind of business case could save the U.S. in the ball park of $1 Billion.