Feds to disclose cloud plans

The White House is set to unveil its plans this week to make cloud computing services available to federal agencies. Vivek Kundra, the federal government's chief information officer, is expected to roll out the first phase of the administration's cloud computing storefront at a California press event on Tuesday.

The plan calls for providing agencies with a central location where they acquire simple collaboration and productivity tools. They hope that by turning to cloud computing, the government can save money and increase efficiency through use of easy-to-deploy computing services available on the Internet.

The Office of Management and Budget has directed the General Services Administration to build the cloud storefront based on the GSA Advantage platform. GSA has issued a request for quote for infrastructure-as-a-service, and twice has issued a request for information for software-as-a-service. The third piece of the storefront will be platform-as-a-service.

The initial phase of the cloud computing plan is not likely to be available for sensitive applications. However, there is talk that the government next year may offer cloud-based services hosted in private data centers which could be used to handle some sensitive data.

For more details:
- see this Computerworld article

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