Government officials and cloud vendors were enthusiastic when sharing their case studies and predictions for public sector cloud adoption at last week’s Cloud/Gov conference in Washington, DC. Here are a few media highlights:
Government Moves Toward Cloud Computing ‘Perfect Storm’ (CIO Magazine)
In his opening keynote, GSA’s David McClure discussed the factors that have aligned to make this the best possible environment for public sector cloud computing adoption:
“I think we now have a perfect storm. We have a budget crisis, a new wave of technology that’s actually entered in [to the government]. We have a new generation of CIO and IT leadership in the federal government that I think is very open to this kind of environment.”
GSA creating cloud marketplace for federal services (Federal News Radio)
McClure took it a step further, sharing news about plans for a federal cloud marketplace:
“We want to create a robust environment so that the government is maximizing the use of its computing environment, which is not occurring and which has not occurred historically,” McClure said after a speech Thursday at the Cloud/Gov 2012 event sponsored by the Software and Information Industry Association in Washington. “We are talking to government entities that we think are natural candidates to be in that provisioning space. The second step we have to do is to address the policy, security and all those other things that from a government-to-government interaction, that we have a process in place that is quick, efficient and used the same across government.”
Salesforce.com: ‘Cloud computing debate Is over’ for public sector (IT World)
Cloud and IT vendors from Google, IBM, Red Hat and Salesforce.com were candid about cloud computing security goals.
“You need to evaluate the security controls that are in place and not just say, ‘Oh I’ve got a private cloud so it much be secure,’” said [David] Mihalchik [of Google], who argued by way of analogy that a private plane, say a two-seat Cessna, is not necessarily as safe as a commercial, “multi-tenant” jetliner available to the public.
Laura Greenback is Communications Director at SIIA.