Government Cloud Likely To Start Slow

Posted by J. Nicholas Hoover on September 16, 2009 03:58 PM

The federal government's new cloud computing "storefront," apps.gov, has garnered a lot of hype. However, it'll take time and effort to actually gain traction as well. Apps.gov, meet FISMA and cultural resistance.

Apps.gov is clearly an important first step toward getting the government to adopt cloud computing and an interesting play on how government procurement could be easier. It's just no panacea.

Even in announcing the site Tuesday, federal CIO Vivek Kundra cautioned that there was much to be done before federal agencies felt comfortable with or in some cases are even able to move data to SAAS or IAAS.

In fact, in a keynote address at the InformationWeek 500 Conference on Monday, he said federal agencies have given him more resistance with cloud computing investments than with releasing data.

Why's that? Security, security, security. As of earlier this summer, NIST was working on a document that will describe how cloud computing fits within the Federal Information Security Management Act. That document has yet to be released. Many cloud vendors, meanwhile, aren't even on the federal IT schedule.

"This is going to take time," Kundra said. "It's not going to happen tomorrow, but we need to make sure the industry is able to address concerns about cybersecurity, who owns the data, and where the data lives."

That means that not only will government have to re-think some of its policies and attack cultural aversion to hosting data with third parties, vendors will have to work to meet the government's demands, as some are already doing. For example, Google this week announced that is is working to meet FISMA certification and accreditation requirements for Google Apps by doing things like running a parallel instance of Google Apps for government and keeping all government data within U.S. data centers.