Charles Arthur, writing for The Guardian, describes the recent decision of the British government to implement its own cloud computing system, strongly relying on centralized computing centers across the government

"Moving to a cloud-based infrastructure could cut costs of government computing significantly and also satisfy its drive for a "green" agenda by reducing power usage. The Inland Revenue, for example, is presently seeing huge demand for its online tax return system – but that peaks every January, and then drops substantially. A cloud-based system shared among departments could deal with such sudden loads while using less power, said Kate Craig-Wood, managing director of the hosting company Memset, who has been working with the government on the strategy."