Andrea DiMaio

With the increasing interest of the US federal administration in cloud computing, the debate of pros and cons of the so-called “private (government) cloud” is intensifying. A recent article describes how the private cloud is mostly attractive because of its higher security.

In my humble opinion, though, security is only one aspect. The most important one (and security is part of it) is control. Being able to draw the boundaries of an infrastructure, know its components, where they are located and being able to exercise a fine-grain control on how its resources are assigned and utilized, meets the never-changing desire of government for control. I do not mean this in a negative sense. After all, control is a tool to exercise accountability.

The move toward a private cloud as yet another incarnation of government IT consolidation is unavoidable. Provided that some of the scalability and elasticity principles of cloud computing are retained and that the scale of this “private (government) cloud” is enough to make its services financially viable, this is a welcome evolution for IT shared services and consolidation. On the other hand, I am still hopeful that government organizations that approach cloud computing will look at it as they should. tat is, just as an alternative way to solve their IT needs: if this is the case, then they will look at multiple private as well as public clouds.

It occurred to me that, while we debate this, we always look at governments as users of their own cloud(s) – which we assume to be private for reasons explained above – and private sector organizations to be more likely to use public cloud(s) (although this is not always true, as they have valid compliance reasons to require a comparable level of control on resource location and use).

What we often miss is the possibility that governments, while developing and promoting their own “private clouds”, offer businesses to access such infrastructure.

While this may look odd, it really isn’t. Do you remember those massive investments in broadband infrastructure that governments did in the past? Didn’t many businesses benefit from them? And what about the rationale for government deploying public wireless infrastructure? This is a conversation we have all the time with clients.

In the current economic climate, where governments are playing an increasing role in running and stabilizing the economy, would it be so strange if their deployments of private government cloud infrastructure – planned to consolidate IT across agencies – turned into a platform for businesses (especially small and medium)?

Could this bring private government clouds to interoperate with other private ones (used by business) as well as with the “public cloud”?

And, guess what, wouldn’t the next logical step be that private and public clouds are no longer distinguishable?