NASA launches open source cloud initiative

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

In an effort to prepare government agencies to transition from private to public clouds, NASA is preparing to launch an initiative that gives agencies access to its Nebula cloud computing platform, Federal News Radio reports.

At the recent Cloud/Gov 2011 conference in Washington, D.C., NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp said government agencies are "swimming in data." As a result, many agencies are struggling to keep up with the increasing volume of data they generate every day.

Through its initiative, NASA will help government agencies move their data management and other IT solutions to the cloud. According to Kemp, most agencies will initially deploy private cloud solutions, but will eventually move to public clouds, which are more cost-effective.

"Agencies that adopt private clouds are helping every single project take more than one step toward the public cloud; I'd say 90 percent of the way to a public cloud," Kemp said. "So as we work these issues out, there will be a tidal wave of additional savings once we don't have to operate any infrastructure internally within the government."

Many government agencies are expected to make the jump to the cloud this year. In a recent report, federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra said the government will adopt a "cloud first" strategy to IT.