An anonymous reader writes: To address rising information technology costs, the government is making a major commitment to cloud computing, a move that aspires not only to cost and labor efficiencies, but also to environmental responsibility and openness to innovation. In a speech at the NASA Ames Research Center in California on Tuesday, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said that the government cannot continue to invest in traditional data centers to support its IT needs. "Why should the government pay for and build infrastructure that is available for free?" he said. "In these tough economic times, the federal government must buy smarter." Kundra acknowledged that the government's sensitive and secret data must continue to be maintained in government-owned, government-operated facilities. However, he stressed that free and low-cost consumer-oriented services can and should be leveraged by the government. He cited the TSA's plan to deploy a blog, which was budgeted at $600,000 despite the fact that consumers can deploy blogs for free. Kundra, in a blog post, concedes there are still security, privacy, and information management issues to be addressed. But he claims that these issues will be resolved eventually. "Along the way, we will need to address various issues related to security, privacy, information management and procurement to expand our cloud computing services"
