Image via Wikipedia

When Barack Obama was elected as President of United States, I predicted that his administration would tap into Cloud Computing for governance. Soon Obama team was talking about moving the Government to Clouds. In fact, there was even “bipartisan” support for the idea. It only make sense to move the government to the Clouds when the economy is in such a mess and there is a strong need to cut down Government spending to balance the budget. Any cut in unnecessary Government spending, however small it may be, bodes well in this economy.

Today, there is a news that the Government is planning to move USA.Gov, the US Government’s official internet portal, to the Clouds. The U.S General Services Administration (GSA) has selected Terremark Worldwide, Inc., the provider of Enterprise Cloud Computing Platform, to power USA.Gov portal.

The distributed grid architecture of the enterprise cloud offers the necessary redundancy, scalability and flexibility needed for the national government portal. With Terramark’s Cloud, it is possible to seamlessly add or remove additional computing resources just with a few mouse clicks. Their cluster supports Linux, Solaris and Windows and a dashboard to manage the computing resources offering full control. They are PCI Compliant and have successfully completed SAS 70 Type II audit which makes sure the infrastructure is compliant with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

The main advantages of moving USA.Gov to Cloud are

• The government can save money in this deep economic downturn while moving to a superior technology infrastructure
• This administration can then follow what they preach. Using green technologies for the functioning of the Government helping to reduce the negative effects to environment
• As I have indicated in one of my other posts, this will help enterprises trust Cloud Computing more

This is a good first step but I would like the federal government and other state governments move their entire infrastructure to the Clouds starting with apps like Email, Office Productivity Suite, etc.. It will be wise to follow the footsteps of Washington DC local Government. We need more Vivek Kundras in every federal department and state governments.