In the spirit of President Barack Obama's goals to modernize the U.S. government, the administration's CIO Vivek Kundra announced on Tuesday the launch of a new cloud service for government agencies and shared the government's goals to leverage substantially more cloud-based solutions than it has been leveraging up until now.

"We've been building data center after data center, acquiring application after application and, frankly, what that's done is it's driven the cost and investments in technology across the board and it also has led to a doubling of energy consumption from 2000 to 2006," Kundra said in a press conference at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "We cannot continue on that trajectory because there's innovation happening across the country."

The federal IT budget is about $76 billion, $19 billion of which is spent on infrastructure. That infrastructure serves more than 300 million customers with more than 10,000 systems. "And a lot of these investments are duplicative," Kundra said. As examples, he brought the General Services Administration, which operates eight data centers, and Department of Homeland Security, which has 23 data centers.

Government CIOs need to make sure "that we don't continue to build (when) we can leverage (what) may exist in the private sector or what exists already in the public sector."

The newly launched cloud-based service Apps.gov is operated by the GSA. It is an "online storefront" where agencies can buy IT solutions as services, instead of building infrastructure to support the applications they need. Its first customer is the Department of Energy, which began using the service on Tuesday, Kundra said.

The first federal CIO in history of the U.S. also called upon the technology industry to respond "to what we're doing, in terms of providing these solutions." GSA is coordinating the procurement process for vendors to provide services to federal agencies through Apps.gov and Kundra expects more solutions to become available through the portal in the coming months.

Obama appointed Kundra in March of 2009.