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Feds To Adopt 'Cloud First' IT Policy
theodp writes "The White House Thursday announced plans to restructure IT by consolidating federal government data centers and applications, and adopting a so-called 'cloud first' policy. Unveiled by federal CIO Vivek Kundra, the 25-Point Plan (PDF) calls for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015, as well as shifting work to cloud computing systems. The new 'Cloud First' policy cites the ability of Animoto.com to scale vs. the government's short-lived Cars.gov (Cash for Clunkers), although Google Trends suggests this may be somewhat of an apple-to-oranges comparison for justifying a national IT strategy. As long as we're talking clouds, a tag cloud of the 25-Point Plan underscores that the Feds are counting more on IT Program and Contract Management rather than Computer Science wizardry to deliver 'the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT.' Not to be a buzzkill, but those of you celebrating CS Education Week might be advised to consider an MBA if you want a Federal IT career."
No. The term "cloud" may have started as a buzz word but it has taken some serious shape in less than a year. For a serious, comprehensive definition, check a short document posted by NIST.
In short, "Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction".
It doesn't have to be necessarily hosted on external providers. It may very well be an internal, Private Cloud. And if it's built on top of open standards such as the vCloud API, you may end up with vApps that can be moved from internal to external clouds and back, as well as hybrids.