Does Your Cloud Effort Meet These Five Requirements?

A recent review of a major U.S. government agency's cloud efforts shows that moving towards a cloud model is not easy. The National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) defines characteristics for federal cloud compliance, and lists five that they say are necessary:

- on-demand self-service,
- broad network access,
- resource pooling,
- rapid elasticity, and
- measured services

According to the official NIST definition, "cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, 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." A recent report on the State Department's cloud efforts reveals just how hard it can be for federal agencies to meet this simple-sounding checklist. While the Department of State has some problems with their approach, according to the a report by Deputy Inspector General Harold Geisel, he asserts that, for the most part, State’s Systems and Integration Office executes its duties appropriately. Read the full article here at GCN, or go straight to the Inspector General's report.