On Thursday, February 16^th, I spent the day at the SIIA Cloud/Gov conference in Washington, DC. The event had a strong turnout (150-200 attendees), with some good buzz in the halls. I was fascinated by the range of Cloud deployment that is occurring across the government, with the panels and keynotes painting a picture of accelerating adoption up and down the Cloud Ecosystem ™ stack. This included a wide range of SaaS deployments, public and private cloud infrastructure (moving existing workloads, as well as deploying new workloads), growing use of PaaS (such as by the DOD) . . . as well as a variety of business process management capabilities.

As the keynote David McClure (from GSA) emphasized, the Federal government is facing a perfect storm of tight budgets, new technology and a new generation of CIOs that are poised to take advantage of the Cloud. This clearly mirrors what is happening in the private sector (see Lens 360 blog post CIO Insight: Importance of Cloud in IT Strategies/Plans Growing). McClure emphasized that some of the key challenges associated with the Cloud still need to be resolved (security/privacy, and release of data), but likewise shared that the recently released GSA framework for contracting in the Cloud via FedRAMP is steadily evolving, including the recent addition of 45 controls to FISMA Moderate. This will clearly help further accelerate adoption across the Federal government, and overcome some of the procurement challenges that have existed in support of the Cloud-First policy published in early 2011.