Consolidation at the crossroads

But for IT shops arriving on the horns of a dilemma of financial pain and technological aging, the way forward looks a lot different that it did just a couple of years ago. Cloud computing now offers private, public, and hybrid alternatives to the classic in-house consolidation project. Those options could help cash-strapped governments trim equipment, maintenance and administrative costs when compared with in-house installations, a financial lure that hasn't been lost on vendors who have bid exclusively cloud-based solutions in some recent e-mail procurements.

The Florida legislature in 2010 passed a law targeting e-mail as a cost-savings possibility, the initial push that in the long run brought the state to the cloud. The law called for the creation of a statewide e-mail service to be provided by the Southwood Shared Resource Center, a data center run by Florida's Agency for Enterprise Information Innovation.