Cloud computing requires a major re-education

It sounds like cloud computing is already part of the federal government. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra talks about it all the time. Plenty of others in government are embracing it, too. But a new article in this week's Government Executive points out that it will require a very major shift in thinking for agency information technology shops and for federal computer users if it is to be adopted in a big way.

So far, there is little evidence that the federal government is capable of taking on a major new initiative without lots of slow starts, stops and failures. There have been plenty of IT disasters in the past that were poorly executed and wasted millions of dollars.

On its face, cloud computing is a money-saver. Instead of each individual agency making massive hardware and software buys, Kundra wants agencies to buy IT as a service, where agencies pay for Internet access to shared hardware and software housed at an offsite data center.

"A new generation of federal decision-makers doesn't need to see the servers running the applications," Tom Simmons, vice president for government systems at Citrix Systems, a leading virtualization vendor, told Government Executive. "They need to see the applications running on the client device. That cultural shift is coming.''

Part of the change with cloud computing is that managers will have to trust a contractor to deliver applications and data to them over the Internet. Nevertheless, technology experts predict agencies will migrate to cloud computing, albeit gradually. They may have to as money gets tight, and it becomes the norm, rather than the exception in government. Still, expect to see a lot of growing pains, and plenty of experimental forays into this new cyberspace world.

For more on the feds and cloud computing:
- check out this Government Executive article