NIST did a great job today of putting on the Cloud Computing Forum and Workshop IV. My big take away for the day was the marked degree in seriousness that Agency leaders seemed to be looking to the cloud to solve some of their real world challenges. The language around the cloud is changing a bit from "cloud service providers," to "common service providers," While leaders are still citing privacy and security as real areas of concern, there is recognition that adopting cloud characteristics can make Enterprise IT work better. I figure that this is a real achievement.
IT is becoming about service delivery, whether internal or externally hosted. Cloud computing is a good way to fix many of the architectural problems that very siloed structures have created over decades and that Agencies have been forced to Bandaid together. It was simply too costly or too complex to do anything else. As someone who has watched the Infrastructure as a Service evolve, I have to say it's quite rewarding to start to hear some of the problems being articulated more clearly so that industry can come alongside the Government to help fix them.
Just the view from my part of the cloud...
