The theme of this week’s news in the government and enterprise cloud sphere has been decidedly compliance and security-related. These onslaughts of security and fear-driven (or lack of knowledge-driven; the two are one in the same when we’re talking cloud in many cases) seem to come in waves—and for no particular reason.

For that matter, the last seven days have brought a whole slew of new studies and reports, all of which are communicating the same basic idea—that there is a general lack of knowledge about cloud, which is leading to fear of adoption. The secondary emphasis is that with greater pushes to create broad security and compliance procedures and policies this can be corrected, but it’s going to be an extended exercise in education, outreach, and patience. This seems to be particularly the emphasis in all stories related to government adoption—businesses seem ready to start dabbling if they haven’t already but dabbling seems dangerous when the only information you’re finding in mainstream media presents cloud as a massive (but calculated) risk.

Of course, articles that have received mass mainstream distribution like “The Largest Cloud in the World is Owned by a Criminal Network” don’t do much to add to knowledge about what cloud can do and some releases with less juicy titles (such as “Lessons from Open Source”) that talk about how cloud, like other “ethereal” movements before it experienced growing pains like the ones its is facing now.

Today the Government Business Council (GBC) in conjunction with GTSI and Oracle released the results of a survey that discussed the major barriers preventing large-scale cloud adoption for federal agencies in the United States. The survey notes that despite the increased emphasis on virtualization from the Office of Management and Budget’s Federal Data Center Initiative, too few people (outside of government IT) understand the cloud well enough to make decisions about it that are not simply wrapped up in fears about security. According to the study, “many federal executives are unfamiliar with virtualization; one-third of survey respondents say they have no knowledge of the concept” and only small sliver of the population (13%) said they were “very familiar with the cloud. Although the survey revealed that people understood it enough to know it could produce resource savings, there were general misconceptions about security in particular. This led to the suggestion that government IT executives should hold a training and education program—something hard to disagree with given the numbers. Such a program would be especially useful to compensate for the fact that most respondents didn’t understand what it would mean to implement and work within virtualization environments.

And we certainly must not forget yesterday’s release of the Lockheed Martin report on barriers to cloud adoption in government, which included the explanation that the cloud is either misunderstood or not understood at all by agency officials, which even further lends to suspicion about cloud adoption. This was generally echoed in other survey-based results for enterprise rather than government as well.

This news is being disseminated and companies are jumping on board with strategic partnerships to build trust in the cloud, even if it means collaborating with competitors. For instance, In related news today on the cloud security front, Verisign is also looking to extend its reach into the cloud through its partnership with other cloud and internet security firms like Conformity, Ping Identity, TriCipher, and Qualys. In the release, one of the notes about the purpose behind its strategic alliances is stated as being in the realm of federation. According to Verisign, “To achieve widespread adoption, a trusted identity must be broadly accepted throughout the cloud. Ping Identity and TriCipher enable enterprises to establish one online identity for users with a single, secure sign-on across virtually every leading SaaS application.”

Compliance is the Other Issue of the Moment–

Soon compliance is going to be the big news item—once this latest round of discouraging survey results have been discussed at length, announcements about broad education outreach efforts have died down or been implemented in practice. Today, for instance, Lieberman Software announced its plans to hold a webinar on cloud compliance – wonder how this will play out next week. Expect Vivek Kundra to address this in addition to repeating the same news from the week’s surveys at the Government IT Leadership Forum in June.

And oh, hey…

I’ve been sort of collecting a series of links with outrageous titles related to the mysterious dangers that lurk in the cloud. If you have any that are of particular interest, would you mind kicking them my way?