CLOUD2 Study Shows How the Feds Can Migrate to Cloud Computing

A blue-ribbon US government panel co-chaired by Marc Benioff and Michael Capellas released their report today, a summary of which can be found here.

The Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2), a collection of 71 industry executives, has been meeting over the past several months and has come out with its recommendations on ways to move towards cloud computing.

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The 14 recommendations focus on four vitally important areas to cloud computing:

• Trust: Individuals and organizations must be confident that the cloud can meet their needs including security, privacy and availability. One recommendation is for industry and government entities to accelerate the development of a private sector-led identity management ecosystem and to deploy strong authentication techniques throughout all federal agencies. Another is to enact a national data breach law.

• Transnational Data Flows: The cloud is not defined by national borders; businesses and data flow across international lines and the United States must lead by example in dealing with these challenges, and be willing to trust the cloud for appropriate workloads in other countries.
• Transparency: Cloud providers will earn confidence from corporate America and government agencies by providing users meaningful ways to evaluate cloud implementations. Cloud providers should enable document and tool portability across different cloud environments.
• Transformation: For full adoption of the cloud, there must be a change in how the federal government acquires technology; an investment in improving technology infrastructure including expediting broadband deployment and the move to IPv6; a commitment to ensuring that education and training priorities align with the needs of a cloud workforce; and creating incentives to encourage the global development and adoption of cloud technologies. Congress and other executive agencies should help agencies acquire cloud services and solutions.

As part of this effort, the Cloud First Buyer’s Guide were produced as a living website to help encourage movement towards cloud computing throughout the government. Both the buyer’s guide and the overall report was produced by the TechAmerica Foundation led by staff director Jennifer Kerber.

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