3 reasons the feds are avoiding cloud computing

A New York Times article does a great job defining the issues around cloud adoption within the U.S. government -- or, I should say, the glaring lack thereof. As the Times reports, "Such high praise for new Internet technologies may be common in Silicon Valley, but it is rare in the federal government."

Convenient excuses for skirting cloud computing are easy to find these days; for example, attacks on internal government systems from abroad this spring and summer are easy to recall. In July, the Pentagon said it suffered its largest breach when hackers obtained 24,000 confidential files.

I suspect that issues such as the recent attacks are going to be more the rule than the exception, so there will always be an excuse not to move to cloud. (I reject the notion that cloud-based systems are fundamentally less secure, by the way.) It's really how you use security best practices and technology, not so much where the server resides. I'm not suggesting that state secrets go up on Amazon Web Services right now, but almost all of the other information managed by the government is fine for the cloud.