Federal CIO says cloud computing is Obama administration priority
Updated: 2009-11-30
The Obama administration sees SaaS as an essential enabler of ability and cost savings and views cloud computing as a priority, a high-ranking federal information officer said Sunday.
Casey Coleman, chief information officer for the General Services Administration, told technology news website ZDNet that federal officials are developing strategies to adopt cloud-based technologies in a way that complies with security and privacy mandates.
"Productivity and work flow-type applications that would ordinarily reside on the desktop are areas where SaaS solutions can play a key role," she said.
Coleman said that the government is required to follow control and security rules established under the Federal Information Security Management Act, and claimed that Obama administration officials are examining how to apply these rules to cloud computing providers. Most existing regulations were established before the current wave of SaaS technology.
A number of prominent state and local government agencies have already begun moving to the cloud. In October, the Los Angeles City Council chose to switch to Google's cloud-based email service over competing proposals from Microsoft, and analysts expect many smaller municipalities to follow suit.
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