Federal information technology workers are preparing to move into the cloud, according to a survey released Thursday.

About one-third of attendees at the FOSE 2010 government IT trade show in March said their agencies have cloud-computing initiatives planned for this year, up from 12 percent in 2009.

Additionally, 58 percent of respondents said they think cloud computing is important or very important, up from 41 percent last year.

The results indicate that federal IT workers increasingly see cloud computing as the future, perhaps taking their cue from federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra, who's pushed virtualization as a way to save money and reduce energy consumption. Virtualization is the technology that makes cloud computing work — agency employees and organizations would no longer have their own dedicated physical servers, but instead would access files and applications hosted on a large central server or servers.

So far, agencies have been slow to move into the cloud and the General Services Administration has had some trouble adding services to its apps.gov website, established last year at Kundra's request to provide a one-stop shop for cloud computing. Just 7 percent of survey respondents said their departments had already adopted cloud computing.

Kundra said in a recent interview with Federal Times that the government plans to re-engage with vendors to offer cloud-computing services to agencies at the federal, state and local levels. The National Institute of Standards and Technology will host an event May 20 with experts in academia and industry, Kundra said.

"We want to make sure that we're engaging the private sector and approaching this in a consensus-driven manner," Kundra said.

Kundra issued a memo to all agency CIOs in February instructing them to come up with plans to consolidate their data centers by the end of June, and incorporate those plans into fiscal 2012 budgets. That mandate will likely accelerate the drive to the cloud, said Julia Lim, vice president of marketing for ScienceLogic, the IT firm that conducted the survey at FOSE.

"The fastest way to get there is via virtualization and cloud computing," Lim said. "It's going to shift very rapidly to acceptance."

The survey indicated that federal agencies prefer private clouds to public clouds by a wide margin. That means an agency would own the resources and create its own cloud, rather than going to a company such as Google. This is largely because of security concerns that would arise if federal agencies shipped their data outside the government firewall, Lim said.

ScienceLogic CEO David Link said it could still take 10 or 15 years to modernize government IT, but the Obama administration has started a strong push in that direction.

"There's a sense of urgency that's pretty cool to see," Link said.