As more people go online to see polling results on Election Day, the increased traffic can wreak havoc on IT infrastructure not designed for huge spikes in demand. But experts agree that the cloud is starting to gain momentum for hosting those sites, due to the belief that the cloud is more reliable and can upscale quickly to avoid crashes.
Andy Pitman, industry solutions manager for Microsoft, said in addition to the technical benefits of the cloud, by not maintaining expensive infrastructure for a capability that’s only used sporadically each year, using cloud technology for elections reporting and results can also save governments money.
“This turns out to be, at least from what I’ve seen, one of the very best scenarios for government cloud computing,” Pitman said. “This truly is a situation where the resources probably wouldn’t even be used except for the period of the election. So we’re talking about one day or a handful of days. The rest of the time it sits around pretty much idle.”
Terry Weipert, senior executive with Accenture, a management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, agreed. Weipert said if states aren’t moving their election results websites to the cloud, they should be.
“Think about the retail industry and the folks that have retail portals doing secure transactions at key times — that is working,” Weipert said. “So why wouldn’t we do whatever it is they are doing for elections results?”
Full Article: Election Results Websites Heading to the Cloud.