Andrea DiMaio

Yesterday, I addressed our audience at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando on cloud computing in government about the possible competition between vendor cloud providers (like Google, Amazon, Terremark, and so forth) and government infrastructure owners (such as NASA Ames, DISA, NBC). I have blogged about this before and I also asked a related question to Vivek Kundra, the US Federal CIO, while I was interviewing him on stage. Before that, my colleague Jeff Vining moderated a panel with those same government agencies on stage.

By one of those coincidences that make life so interesting, pretty much at the same time NASA was announcing that the Office of Management and Budget is moving USASpending.gov to NASA Ames Research Center’s cloud computer infrastructure called Nebula.

On Tuesday Oct 20 at 12:30 pm I will moderate a vendor panel with Microsoft, Google, Salesforce.com, Terremark and CSC to have their views about where they think cloud computing in government should and will go and to provoke some discussion about whether they think the will cooperate or rather compete with NASA Ames and the likes.

Interestingly enough, when answering my question, Vivek suggested that providers such as NASA or DISA would provide services for specific government constituencies (such as scientists or defense agencies). However the USASpending.gov, which he did not mention on stage, shows that we are at the brink of interesting times, where federal agencies might have choices between internal or external cloud services. How the GSA cloud storefront Apps.gov will evolve in response to this remains to be seen.

Incidentally, for those who look at internal government cloud solutions as a better option from a security standpoint, another coincidence was an article by NextGov about the vulnerability of systems and data at NASA.