A group of over 70 of the world’s authorities on cloud computing have released a policy and IT implementation guide to aid governments as they consider a move to cloud infrastructures.
The resource guide, called the “Cloud First Buyer’s Guide for Government” was spearheaded by SAP’s global solutions unit lead, Sanjay Poonen and Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff following the U.S. government’s announcement of the CLOUD2 initiative.
A number of experts have weighed in on resource guide for government adoption of cloud computing, including members of the TechAmerica Foundation and leaders from Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco, HP, CSC and academics from Georgetown University and MIT.
Given the heavy vendor involvement in the Cloud Buyer’s Guide (not to mention the name), SAP’s Poonen claims that it is not a sales document. He says, “Government all over are looking to save costs and improve time to market for IT, and cloud has captured a lot of their interest.” He insists that the document is merely a roadmap to help government officials determine if cloud computing is suitable for their operations and if so, it offers them an on-ramp and set of strategies to explore the concept further.
In addition to providing a series of best practices guidelines for a number of decision-making levels within the government, Poonen says that this product of over 2,000 hours of work puts focus on four areas—all of which address different layers of concern that governments have expressed about cloud computing.
These areas include trust (privacy, security and reliability); transparency (ways for governments to monitor cloud implementations); transformation (the required “shift in thinking” outside of traditional infrastructure) and concerns about trans-national data flows (addressing potential U.S. leadership in creating healthy ways of moving data across borders).