http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=14413

‘Cloud outages’ have occasionally blighted public implementations and will be unacceptable. Government will play a central role in driving maturity of the Cloud space. Interoperability standards, best practices, design patterns and, importantly, security principles all require close private sector engagement.

Below is a great recap from Susie Adams, Microsoft’s Federal Civilian and IGO Chief Technology Officer.

http://www.rdmag.com/News/Feeds/2010/05/information-tech-government-and-industry-at-the-table-for-cloud-com/

The rest of the day had the same tone: focused on finding and fixing the actual impediments to cloud computing for the government, with a genuine sense of inter-agency cooperation, led from the top.

Here is an example.  When you use your browser to search for something, such as through Google, do you know where the servers that are processing your search request are located?  Do you even care where the servers are located?  No, of course not.  You have a browser window open, you type in what you are searching for and the results come back.  The search could have been run in California or London for all you know.  It does not matter where these servers are located because you are not using a telephone dialup to get to the Internet like back in the early 1990s.  You are using high-speed broadband.  As we all know the speed difference is significant. Instead of moving a paragraph per second, you can now move a book per second with broadband.

http://www.reliableplant.com/Read/24569/Cloud-computing-smart-manufacturing

This “pay by the drink” scenario will revolutionize manufacturing in the same way that the Internet has already revolutionized our everyday and business lives

http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/cloud-computing-isnt-just-hosting-2-0/140427

Bernard Golden tells why some companies who think cloud computing is the same as Hosting 2.0 are running into problems putting apps on platforms like Amazon

http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/cloud-saas/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224202583

NASA engineers have developed a cloud computing environment in a portable container that’s about to go into broader testing.

http://www.itproportal.com/network/news/article/2010/4/8/should-government-develop-g-cloud/

It also requires significant changes in operational process to align to the highly flexibly and dynamic nature of cloud computing

Governments and businesses alike are looking at cloud services as a way to consolidate IT infrastructure, scale their IT systems for the future, and enable innovative services and activities that were not possible before.

To help organisations realise the benefits of cloud services, technology vendors are investing in the hard work of identifying and solving the challenges presented by operating in mixed IT environments and are collaborating to ensure that their products work well together.

In fact, although the industry is still in the early stages of collaborating on cloud interoperability issues, there has already been considerable progress. But what does “cloud interoperability” mean, and how is it benefiting people today?

http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/Collaborating-on-cloud-interoperability/4483/Default.aspx

With all the excitement around the cloud, Shank says it’s easy to lose sight of the payoff. “To be clear, cloud computing has enormous potential to stimulate economic growth and enable governments to reduce costs and expand services to citizens.”

The first phase of design work on the G Cloud will be completed in February, and government chief information officer John Suffolk said the first public-sector organisations will begin hosting some of their systems on a test version of the G Cloud in 2010.

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/itmanagement/0,1000000308,40012776,00.htm

The government has embarked on the G Cloud project, part of a package of measures detailed in its Government ICT Strategy released on Wednesday. The platform could eventually host applications and services for Westminster departments, more than 400 councils and other public-sector bodies in the UK.

iStore launched on Thursday Digital Oilfield Online, a cloud-based hosting service for its PetroTrek software suite. The company unveiled its online cloud computing capability at the Microsoft Global Energy Forum, where it announced the immediate availability of cloud-hosted PetroTrek solutions in addition to its existing on-premises offerings.

iStore, which helps oil and gas companies access, organize and visualize exploration and production (E&P) data, has adopted the Microsoft Windows Azure Services platform for delivering Digital Oilfield solutions in the cloud.

http://www.wwpi.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8216:istore-brings-cloud-computing-to-the-digital-oilfield&catid=230:cloud-computing&Itemid=2701186

The new service supports the Public Petroleum Data Model (PPDM), an open standard widely accepted by the industry for business-oriented data storage. This gives companies a roadmap for moving capital-intensive on-premises data management to the cloud.

The Cloud Security Alliance has released a new version of its guide to ensuring safety when using cloud computing contractors. The alliance, lead by prominent security experts, says the new version provides more specific questions to ask cloud providers, plus best practices and pitfalls. It covers 13 security considerations in the cloud, including incident response, encryption and key management, and identity and access management

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/index.php?nid=15&sid=1848108

Cybersecurity Update