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Is the Pentagon ready to stick its head in the cloud?

January 14, 2009 9:31pm
by Richard Waters

On the surface, it sounds a bit of a stretch. With cloud computing in its infancy and most big companies still wary of handing over control of their data, matters of national security sound far too important to be outsourced to someone else’s data centre.

Still, that hasn’t stopped Amazon, which has been helping to set the early pace in this new market, from trying. Our sharp-eyed correspondent Jonathan Birchall spotted this job advert (for someone to develop a government market for cloud computing services) on the retailer’s web site.

From the ad:

Do you have the business savvy and the technical background necessary to help establish Amazon as a key technology platform provider in the federal, state and DOD [Department of Defense] communities?

Certainly, many areas of government will not be ready to make the switch. But that doesn’t mean that some routine computing tasks can’t be outsourced. With intense pressure to hold down costs, and the first Federal Chief Technology Officer expected to be announced any day, this could be the perfect moment to lay down policy on government access to the cloud.

January 14, 2009 9:31pm in Digital media | Comment

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