USTA Scores Cost Savings, Agility with Amazon Cloud Service

Not every company can expect to garner the benefits that the USTA has from the cloud, Bonfante and other experts are quick to note. The research is nevertheless in relative infancy, analysts say, and may not be quite ready to take on a role as an at-the-ready backup for, say, major retailers who may want to use it to augment their own data centers while peak shipping periods.

In early 2010, the USTA was facing a situation familiar to many IT shops; in response to increasing demands, the USTA was continuing to build out its computing infrastructure resulting in ongoing and increasing capital expenditures. Before in his tenure at USTA, Bonfante opted to nix the organization's internal data center and turn over that infrastructure to a third party hosting company. As infrastructure investments increased, operational expenses followed suit. "Hosting costs were very significant for a company of our size," Bonfante recalls.