Feds: We Need Priority Access To Cloud Resources 183
New submitter BButlerNWW writes "Federal agencies must be assured priority and uninterrupted access to public cloud resources before fully embracing the technology for national security and emergency response IT functions, a recent report finds. It recommends creating a program to develop a system to ensure federal organizations receive 'first-in-line' access to cloud-based resources during emergency situations."
The article is 100% reasonable (Score:5, Informative)
As is often the case, the headline is completely misleading. The federal government isn't demanding first priority to cloud resources.
They are saying that they can't move national security and emergency services into public clouds until the cloud providers can give them the guaranteed uptime that they have now with dedicated servers, so they're going to keep running those services on dedicated servers. This is worth talking about in that it's an exception to the general rule that the federal government is trying to move everything to cloud providers.
The article even notes that there are some specialized cloud providers (e.g. Terramark's Federal group) that offer a higher level SLA than the public cloud providers, specifically aimed at providing the kind of SLA required for national security and emergency services.
Please RTFA before flaming.
Re:Personally... (Score:4, Informative)
They do need to be first in line. About fifteen years ago I took a class at a local college, and the instructor was in charge of the Illinois Secretary of State's mainframe. We all got a tour of the inside of the impressive thing. That state trooper pulling over that car needs computer access a hell of a lot more than you do, and my instructor proudly stated that they had zero downtime for five years. They have two natural gas generators in case of power outage (redundancies everywhere), that sort of thing.
If your town gets hit by a tsunami or tornado or earthquake, FEMA and your state emergency agency is going to need those computers. You probably won't.