Comments on: David Kralik: Why feds should embrace the cloud

Cloud computing offers dot-gov agencies real benefits, including speed, ease of use, and cost, says David Kralik, director of Internet strategy at Newt Gingrich's American Solutions advocacy group.

[whurley]

I wrote about the need for the feds to sponsor a national computing cloud to spur innovation last month: http://weblog.infoworld.com/whurley/archives/2009/01/cloud_computing.html

Clearly there are benefits enterprises as large as government could see from cloud computing; i.e. consolidation and better resource management.

[rapier1]

You can't just move everything over to a thin client. The first rogue backhoe that takes out a critical fiber would end up bringing all work to a screeching halt. Government operations have to be able to continue to work in the face of a catastrophe - introducing new vulnerabilities willy nilly is just ludicrous.

[Renegade Knight]

I don't trust my data (or government data) to companies in "The Cloud". Control is key. Cloud computing moves control out of your hands.

[Pete Bardo]

I personally wouldn't trust any recommendations coming from an organization with any relationship to Newt Gingrich. I met the man many years ago. He's still the same closed-minded neo-conservative idiot he was then.

To think, or even suggest, that Amazon's cloud computing security features can offer a more secure computing environment is insane. Why not just outsource to India?

[Danathar]

The government trusts it's data to contractors all the time, both off-site with mainframes/mini/servers operated by big service providers (EDS, IBM for example) and right in the government's own data centers in federal buildings. If a contractor wanted to steal data all they would have to do is walk out with a hard disk. In non-classified facilities it would not be that hard.

Those contractors have to follow rules. Google is a contractor like any other and would have to follow the same rules. There is nothing more inherently safe or unsafe using google as a contractor vs any other service provider that currently does government processing somewhere else.

[bdaughtry]

"The second benefit is speed. Again, because cloud applications are delivered via the Internet"

This guys an idiot. Applications run over the internet faster than on the local system? Cloud computing is fine ONLY for things that you can check later if the web is congested. Any moron that's tried to order online during Christmas knows this is a fallacy. The only thing that can improve upon our current government operations, and high-quality civil servants is if they have to also wait on their internet connections. Give me a break!

[rapier1]

This is a fine point. While it is faster to deploy an application that application may not run any faster (and likely won't) than a local application. Something a lot of people don't understand is that networks have delay. If the application is delay sensitive the farther away the server is the more delay you'll experience. The problem is that its not necessarily a linear relationship but is dependent on the class of application.

[QASIMARA]

Given that the entire argument of this article hinges on the phrase "any individual institution" to refer to the government of the United States of America, I think it can be disavowed.