MITRE/ATARC Cloud White Paper

Excerpt

Each MITRE-ATARC Collaboration Session was a focused and moderated discussion among government, industry, academic, and MITRE representatives about a cloud computing challenge area.

Three separate sessions were held, individually focusing on:

• Cloud Computing in Austere Environments/Cloud Computing for the Mobile Worker
• Security as a Service
• Impact of Cloud Computing on the Enterprise

Each collaboration session produced common themes. In general, Government cloud computing struggles with security concerns and standards, acquisition processes, budgeting and procurement, and disconnected efforts.

With these cross-cutting challenges in mind, the collaboration sessions made the following high-level recommendations for the Government when implementing cloud computing:

• Identify low risk targets to initially implement
• Pilot and test early and often to fail early with low impact
• Lessons learned need to be shared across the Government
• State and local governments should be included in information sharing – not just Federal
• Identification and prioritization of high-priority data
• Focus on the management of data and the use of cloud technologies as a tool
• Educate the decision makers on the cloud implementation challenges