FCC Taps Terremark Enterprise Cloud

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The Federal Communications Commission has chosen Terremark to help the agency transition its website and other online services to the cloud.

The agency will use Terremark's Enterprise Cloud platform to redesign its website and move it from in-house servers to the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering, according to Terremark. The agency also plans to offer more online services to citizens with the cloud.

The FCC will leverage Terremark's cloud for an enterprise-scale processing pool, storage and networking, according to the vendor.

But the FCC won't abandon its own data center for its work with Terremark; it is developing a hybrid cloud solution. This means the agency also will connect its own dedicated servers to Terremark servers running the cloud. That way, the FCC can employ resources from the cloud when it needs to. Cloud computing has been one of U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra's top priorities since he took his post. The administration also has mandated that all government agencies cut costs by consolidating data centers and has encouraged using cloud computing as an option to do so.

Though the adoption of cloud computing among federal agencies is in its early stages, the FCC's move bucks a trend that will gain momentum as agencies move further along their consolidation plans.

NASA is one agency leading the administration's cloud adoption. The space agency has teamed with both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft to put software and services on the cloud and has built its own cloud-computing infrastructure, called Nebula.

The FCC is not the only agency to tap Terremark for its cloud infrastructure. The General Services Administration, the Library of Congress and the USA.gov and Data.gov websites also run on Enterprise Cloud.