Released in conjunction with the May 20 Federal Cloud Summit sponsored by NIST at the Department of Commerce, Vivek Kundra’s “The State of Federal Cloud Computing” outlines several new federal initiatives that will provide a big boost for cloud service providers of all stripes.
The first is Standards Acceleration to Jumpstart Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC), a standards development effort that will be chaired by NIST and shared with the public through a new portal. The purpose of establishing standards is to increase portability of applications and interchangeability of service providers so that customers don’t get locked in to one particular technology stack.
The second is the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), a much-needed cloud-era update to the aging FISMA framework for ensuring information security of federal computing applications. This “in for a dime, in for a dollar” approach leverages an initial security audit of a cloud provider from one agency across multiple other agencies who may choose to use the service at a later time. This prevents duplication of both effort and cost, and provides much faster deployment times for subsequent uses of a given cloud application.
The document also reiterates several of what are by now familiar themes previously introduced in earlier federal policy statements:
- energy reduction through data center consolidation is facilitated by cloud computing,
- federal budget planning for 2011 must include “an alternatives analysis that includes cloud computing,”
- cloud computing will help close the federal government’s technology gap.
- Steve Van Till
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