Seems Uncle Sam is trying to tighten his belt through cloud computing. Government, at both the federal and state level, is debating how to make better use of this cost-cutting innovation. As we reported a few weeks ago, there are already some initiatives coming down the pike, such as Nirvanix providing cloud storage for NASA moon orbiter photos.
Now it looks as if NASA is getting seriously hooked on the cloud. As NextGov is reporting, the Obama administration is considering making NASA an IT service provider, using its cloud computing model in development, Nebula to manage and share all kinds of government data.
As the article explains:
“Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, Obama’s top technology executive, is examining many alternatives for innovation in the cloud, including using Nebula as a centralized platform to service multiple agencies, OMB officials said. Chris Kemp, CIO at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who is spearheading the program, is working with the federal government’s cloud working group, officials added.”
I know this sounds like a good idea in theory, but I do wonder whether it makes sense to trust the folks who brought us the Columbia should be entrusted with vast amounts of federal data. Just saying…
Vivek Kundra has also been busy coming up with federal cloud security standards. As Tim Greene reports in Network World, Kundra is proposing a “storefront model” in which a set of standards can “designate acceptable cloud service providers that government agencies can hire quickly without each agency having to independently determine that they are secure. The goal is to cut the cost and time needed to expand computing resources of government agencies by embracing the well known economic advantages of cloud computing.”
Meawhile, blogger Christopher Hoff (known to many as “Beaker”) says such a standard is already available, as he sketches out in a recent post on his Rational Survivability blog.
It’s not just the feds that are jumping on the cloud. (Which reminds me of this article from “The Onion,” but I digress.) Earlier this week, we read a report that a couple of Washington state legislators are attempting to derail a potential plan for a $300 million data center, because, they argue, the data it’s being built to store could be handled far more cheaply by a cloud provider.
Data Center Knowledge notes that they argue: “…Washington state is ‘home to many of the leading providers of this rapidly evolving commodity service … Still, our own state government has yet to move in this direction in any material way.’ Both Amazon (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) are headquartered in the Seattle area and have in-state data centers that host cloud services.”
Some are concerned that this cloud mania might be getting out of hand. As one Twitterer, Bas Raayman argues–right now, all one has to say is “cloud” and people are lining up for it, without knowing whether it will really turn out to be a good match for the type of data they are trying to store and/or manage.
Time will tell whether this is a flash in the pan, or a flashy new plan that could save the government oodles of much needed dough.
