Tech Daily Dose

An industry group with a record of shaping federal information technology policy has established a cloud computing commission to advise the White House on outsourcing more than $20 billion worth of IT services to the Web, Nextgov.com reported.

The TechAmerica Foundation on Wednesday announced that the board will be co-chaired by the heads of two major Web services firms -- Salesforce.com Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff and CEO Michael Capellas of VCE.

Last month, the Obama administration directed federal agencies to follow a "cloud-first" approach when budgeting computing resources. Instead of investing in new hardware and software licenses, agencies are expected to first consider paying for short-term subscriptions to computer programs, storage space and IT equipment hosted remotely on the servers of companies like Salesforce. The idea is that by consuming IT services on an as-needed basis, rather than maintaining in-house data centers, the government will boost the efficiency of its annual $80 billion IT budget. Click here, to read more.