More Australian government agencies will shift to cloud computing services in 2012, independent technology analyst firm Ovum said Friday.

The shift towards cloud computing, data analytics and agile development will be in response to calls for austerity, said Ovum Research Director Dr Steve Hodgkinson.

"Cloud computing is maturing as a revolutionary step change in the way computing can be sourced and managed. Governments need to look beyond the hype and see the reality of both the opportunities and risks of cloud computing and factor these into both their industry development policies and their internal IT strategies," Mr Hodgkiinson wrote in the report.

Ovum analyst Nishant Shah added there would also be a lot of interest in data analytics as government faces more competition with different stakeholders to determine facts on which policy decisions would be made. He said Australians are expecting that government agencies to have access to authoritative and accurate data.

"This means that agencies need to be planning and implementing strategies to enhance their approach to business intelligence and their ability to analyse and report on an increasing range of data sources from both inside and outside the core systems of government," Mr Shah said.

Agile development, which focuses on early and continuous delivery of useful software refined over time to meet agency requirements, would also gain more acceptability in government offices. Ovum analyst Jessica Hawkins said the shift to agile development will be the result of more frustration with high cost and low success rates of large IT projects.

"The crisis of confidence in IT is being exacerbated by conditions of fiscal austerity. Tightening of budgets makes it all the more important that IT projects both cost less to implement and actually deliver as promised, on time and on budget. In this context, there is increasing enthusiasm for more agile approaches to systems development and applications lifecycle management," Ms Hawkins said.

Outside Australia, over 300 companies with more than $100 billion in yearly IT budgets are shifting to cloud computing, Financial Times reports.

Among the early adaptors are leading global banks and members of the Open Data Centre Alliance. The alliance said in its report published on Thursday that members will triple their cloud deployment in the next two years which would be five times faster adoption rate than the broad market forecast for the cloud computing industry.

Among the members of the alliance are BMW, China Life, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, National Australia Bank, UBS and Disney Technology Solutions.

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