How much does it cost to migrate a government agency to the cloud?

This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce announced it is migrating its 25,000 e-mail inboxes to a cloud-based solution which will integrate calendar, contact, and collaboration tools. The total cost of the migration will be $11.5 million for three-years, contracted to Earth Resource Technologies (ERT), a Maryland-based science and technology contractor who also works with NASA, USAID, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

"The cost to the taxpayer will be 50 percent less than an in-house solution," said NOAA Chief Information Officer Joseph Klimavicz. "As the new standard, cloud computing has great value allowing us to ramp up quickly, avoid redundancy and provide new services and capabilities to large groups of customers."

"This total includes Google's Apps for Government, training, transition, mobile messaging service and other needs specific to NOAA," Klimavicz told us today. "Our estimate to provide an equivalent capability in house was approximately $23 million."

For 25,000 users, Google Apps for Enterprise charges $50 per user per year, and that amounts to $3.75 million for a three-year period of time. NOAA, however, wants to accommodate growth to 50,000 inboxes, which naturally doubles the cost to $7.5 million.

Another significant chunk of this money will go to deploy and support for up to 5,000 BlackBerry accounts, which RIM classifies as a "Fortune 500 scale" deployment. With an $195,000 upfront BES server deployment cost (6 servers), licensing of $55 per user per year, and support of $30 per user per year, this amounts to $1.47 million

That means the remaining $2.53 million will be spent on training, transition, and other needs which NOAA disclosed in its Performance Work Statement last January, which includes cloud backup and e-discovery, security, and remote access.