Census tapping cloud computing

Census Bureau CIO Brian McGrath told InformationWeek that in an effort to save money and increase capacity, the bureau intends to start making greater use of cloud computing.

McGrath said most of the Census Bureau's work in the cloud is limited to software-as-a-service and web hosting. He added that the bureau also is engaged in early planning for a private cloud infrastructure that likely will expand in the next several years.

The Census Bureau currently is using Salesforce.com for its Integrated Partner Contact Database, which stores information on every one of the bureau's 170,000 partners. The 2010 U.S. Census website also makes use of cloud services from Akamai.

In a separate interview with Federal Computer Week, McGrath said the Census Bureau is "in the process of building a census private cloud, which is to take our existing infrastructure and highly virtualize it." He said they will "take a best-practices approach to standardization so we can connect and constitute all of our infrastructure to really deliver rapidly and flexibly a lot of horsepower to our customers."

For more on the Census and the cloud:
- see this InformationWeek article
- read this Federal Computer Week article

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