Will 2010 be the year the public sector migrates to the cloud?

POSTED BY CORY VANDER JAGT, ASTADIA, INC. ON JANUARY 2, 2009

With a number of recent high profile wins for public sector cloud services, it may be time to rethink some misconceptions about government readiness for cloud computing.  Here's just a sampling of the events that have occurred so far in 2009:

• The City of Canton, GA selects Google Apps:  "The City of Canton recently selected Google Apps Premier Edition for its messaging and collaboration needs, saving more than $10,000 and untold IT hours."
   
• Office of the New Mexico Attorney General replaces Microsoft Exchange with Google Apps: "To put it in perspective, Google Apps and Gmail can support any attorney over the course of a whole career, storing and backing up every email he or she ever sends. Google Apps Premier Edition also passed muster with well-known third-party security auditing organizations."
   
• Orlando moves all 3,000 city employees from Notes to Google Apps: "For half the cost of the alternative, Orlando is jumping onto Google's innovation curve and freeing up IT resources to focus on more important efforts."
   
• More than six million students, staff, and faculty at schools worldwide are now actively using Google Apps at school. 
   
• The State Department's Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund migrates to Force.com: "providing an average annual benefit of $1,625,066"
   
• Japan Post Network builds compliance and customer inquiry apps on Force.com: "The company deployed the applications and Salesforce CRM to 40,000 users at 24,000 post offices throughout Japan.

More recently, the city of Los Angeles approved a plan for Google Apps to replace Novell GroupWise for 30,000 city employees, and the United States federal government launched Apps.Gov, an online app store for federal agencies and workers, to reduce the over $75 billion it spends annually on IT.

All of these examples point to a shifting acceptance of the benefits of the cloud model in the public sector, and the ability of service providers to architect cloud solutions that meet the varied security, privacy, availability, procurement, and governance requirements of public organizations.  A similar and more mature adoption of cloud computing in the private sector has been occurring for some time now.  

• Force.com, Google Apps, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have all completed SAS 70 Type II audits
   
• Force.com has additional third party certifications including ISO 27001 and SysTrust
   
• Data stored using AWS, Force.com, or Google Apps is redundantly stored in multiple physical locations as part of normal operation
• Amazon Virtual Private Cloud enables organizations to connect their existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network connection
   
• Google is creating a dedicated cloud for government customers in the US, and working on FISMA certification for Google Apps
   
• Amazon offers the ability to place instances in the US and EU today, with Singapore coming online in 2010, providing redundancy and addressing regional data governance laws
   
• Salesforce.com's reseller agreement with Carahsoft Technology makes Force.com applications available via Carasoft GSA Schedule

No single cloud platform or SaaS application can meet the requirements for every application in a segment as large as the public sector.  However, the open API's and support of internet standards like web services on these platforms allow solution architects to design for the unique challenges presented by government and other public sector applications.