In a blog dedicated to Cloud Computing, published by InfoWorld, David Lithicum, the Cloud Computing guru, inform us that according to various published reports, the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) will mandate in the fiscal year 2011 (which starts in October 2010) that federal agencies not using cloud computing or making cloud computing part of new IT projects will have to justify their reluctance.
By fiscal year 2013, the policy will require agencies to provide details and road maps on their plans for adopting cloud-based technologies. This story has been corroborated at a post at the Federal News Radio website.
This is the latest indication that the Government is getting very serious about the implementation of a Federal Cloud, starting by all the civilian agencies. During 2009, several groups have been established to test feasibility and learn how much it can be saved hardware and infrastructure.
The drive, accordingly to David Lithicum is obviously cost, the OMB believe that moving to a Federal “Cloud” may save significant amount of money and effort on multiple layers of data centers, equipment, personnel, facilities costs and power consumption. A Federal “Cloud” from sea to shining sea my provide coverage for many agencies and projects, however, this is the place to emphasize that performance will be impacted by the location of the user and the distance to the server. In a “Cloud” environment, testing for latency impact is paramount.
The agencies implementing “Cloud” will have to spend significant efforts testing for latency impact on the application performance, as well as mitigation strategies, like acceleration, mirroring and also distributed cashing.
Shunra technologies can provide the perfect test bed for a Cloud environment, by recreating the operational conditions before and after the move to the “Cloud” and providing empirical evidence of the latency impact on the applications.
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