The path to cloud computing is beginning to take shape

By Wyatt Kash,
Director of Event Content Strategy & Editor-at-Large

Connecting state and local government leaders

| November 20, 2009

Cloud computing still has a lot of uncertainties -- among them a lack of maturity among many of its potential services -- but the path toward this nest era of enterprise computing is beginning to take shape.

Federal chief information officers certainly have much more to work with than they did a year ago. Fortunately for federal CIOs and other technology managers, the National Institute of Standards and Technology weighed in this year to standardize the language describing many of the processes associated with cloud computing. Those definitions and various deployment models were again last month. Forrester’s most recent assessment of cloud computing in October is guilty of a bit of cloud-washing of its own. The defines 11 cloud-computing services within the three categories of services defined by NIST for delivering software, infrastructure and platform development tools over the Internet. Forrester’s list includes specialty cloud services for databases, storage systems, desktop PCs and billing systems, among others. That and questions about what services actually work is why drawing a road map to a cloud-based computing future is so challenging. Those priorities were articulated in part this month by David McClure, associate administrator of GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications, which has already begun using cloud services. Also envisioned are centers for technology excellence and innovation to foster pilot projects, demonstrations and proofs of concept, he said.

Perhaps the top challenge in sorting through all the noise about cloud computing as we head into 2010 is trying to establish the right road map for moving forward — especially within government agencies.

It seemed then — as it still does — that there were as many definitions of cloud computing as there were computing and consulting companies angling for a piece of what legitimately promises to be the next great era of enterprise computing.

updated

That hasn’t stopped vendors, of course, from asserting their own definitions — or “cloud-washing” the subject, as Forrester Research’s James Staten describes it.

Forrester report

What the report makes clear, however, is that aside from software-as-a-service offerings, most of the other services associated with cloud computing have significant, if varying, slopes to climb before reaching maturity.

And it’s why the General Services Administration’s near-term priorities regarding cloud computing will likely serve as essential groundwork for evolving to the cloud.

McClure said GSA and federal CIOs have established four working groups focused on:

Security, including privacy and disclosure management.
Standards, particularly involving interoperability and data portability.
Use cases, detailing what must be in place to migrate data successfully to the cloud.
Communication, to promote two-way exchange between government and industry.

No doubt, the road map to federal cloud computing will require a lot more whiteboard work. The good news: The working concepts, and the challenges they present, have begun to take real shape.

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