The Interior Department is looking to take e-mail and collaboration services to the cloud, supporting 88,000 users across all DOI bureaus and office. DOI officials have concluded that the use of a cloud-based e-mail service would result in faster implementation of the required services across all bureaus and offices, according to a request for information to identify potential vendors released Oct. 28.

The new federal strategy for implementing cloud-computing solutions is called “Cloud First” - and with good reason. We now systematically prefer cloud-computing solutions to those based on local servers and laptops.

If government managers knew more about cloud computing, would they embrace it? Apparently, yes. The more familiar state and local government IT decision-makers are with cloud computing, the more they support it and see the benefits it can deliver to their agencies, according to a survey sponsored by Bluetext, a Washington, D.C.-based communications and marketing firm.

The Department of Energy has been hit by multiple cyber-attacks in the past year, costing the federal government over $2 million to recover, according to a recent audit report.

German researchers say they found flaws in Amazon Web Services that they believe exist in many cloud architectures and enable attackers to gain administrative rights and to gain access to all user data. While the researchers say they have told AWS about the security holes and AWS has fixed them, they believe the same types of attacks would be effective against other cloud services, "since the relevant Web service standards make performance and security incompatible."

In keeping with broader federal mandates for IT efficiencies, the Defense Information Systems Agency is pushing forward with cloud strategies for the Defense Department, most recently with a new request for information to launch its enterprise-wide systems engineering solutions.

FBI security rules are holding up the Los Angeles Police Department's move to Google Web-based email and office applications, according to contractors. The federal policies, which relate to confidentiality of criminal history data, could prevent certain agencies from ever moving operations to the cloud, or third-party data centers that provide software over the Internet, experts say.

After years in the works and 15 drafts, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) working definition of cloud computing, the 16th and final definition has been published as The NIST Definition of Cloud Computing (NIST Special Publication 800-145).

The personal financial details of as many as 5,000 college students were temporarily laid bare for other students to view on the Education Department's direct loan website earlier this month, an education official testified Tuesday.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is the latest agency to leverage cloud computing for email and collaboration, with plans to migrate 5,000 users at its Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to Google Apps for Government.