Cloud Computing in the Government

July 1st, 2009 | No Comments | Tags: ,   Share  | Cloud Computing in the Government

We have been working with a few people in the Government space recently about Cloud Computing and invariably the discussion comes around to “What are some of the scenarios in Government that Cloud Computing can help with” – here is a quick take ->

1.    Government Applications Repository ( Private/ Hybrid Clouds )
a.     Create collection of common applications and patterns that can be leveraged across a variety of government departments
b.    For ex, Citizen Identity verification, Status notifications for Citizens thorough email, SMS etc

2.    Cloud Bursting – Public Cloud
a.    Leverage Public Cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2 etc for burst compute scenarios that are compute intensive
b.    For ex, Conversion of government documents to PDF format, Geo Coding public Maps for cities etc.

3.    Storage – Public Cloud
a.    Government applications that have massive storage needs like the ones that store meteorological data, government records etc can leverage  Public cloud storage systems like Amazon S3, SQL Data Services, Google BigTable etc.

4.    Citizen Data Services
a.    Citizen facing applications such as ones that give public updates such as Utilities, taxes, forms, transportation etc can leverage the power of cloud computing to lower upfront costs and scale according to demand.

5.    Automated IT Services
a.    Government IT can automate their development, test and pre production environments on the cloud using virtual environments thereby reducing the data center footprint.