Senator pushes cloud as deficit cutting tool

The federal transition to cloud computing is an overlooked source of savings as the government battles over trillions of dollars in spending reductions, the leader of a Senate oversight subcommittee said this week.

A visibly weary Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., was addressing a conference Wednesday on the future of government cloud computing and the consolidation of federal data centers amid tense negotiations over raising the limit on federal borrowing.

Carper, who is chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Federal Financial Management Subcommittee, listed cost savings from cloud computing as one of several initiatives that could save the government hundreds of billions of dollars annually but that had gotten lost in the acrimonious standoff over whether the deficit should be trimmed by cutting programs alone or by a combination of program cutting and revenue hikes...