The USPTO says it is moving to cloud platform for reasons involving disaster recovery, redundancy, scalability, and reducing provisioning time and operational costs.

It expects that the new platform "cost for enhancing, maintaining, and operating the systems to decrease significantly and, hopefully, by more than the investment cost. The reduction in the system costs would provide the ROI (return on investment)" the agency said.

Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld . Follow Patrick on Twitter at ? @DCgov or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed ? . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com .

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