The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) is 100% on board with moving
towards Cloud Computing. They have built a secure internal cloud that enhances
flexibility and keeps secret data safe.
According to Jill Tummler Singer, the CIA’s deputy CIO, Cloud computing can
give IT environments the ability to be more flexible and more secure if designed
behind a firewall.
A technical definition of cloud computing according to NIST is “a computing capability that provides an abstraction between the computing resource and its underlying technical architecture (e.g., servers, storage, networks), enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
The spy agency has a large foot-hold on virtualization technology and is heavily using it throughout it’s organization. The virtualization concept is the act of making something virtual (not actual). Such virtualization technologies include visualizing operating systems, servers, networks and storage systems. Being that virtualization is the cornerstone to cloud computing, the CIA was well prepared to adopt cloud computing in an enterprise environment.
The secure cloud computing infrastructure that the CIA is building will not be accessible to the public and will be kept behind it’s firewalls to maintain secrecy and all of the data would be encrypted. Other government agencies may have to turn to Apps.gov which provides Cloud services and is ran by the U.S. General Services Administration.
Read more about the CIA’s Cloud Computing initiative here:
CIA_Building_Secure_Cloud_based_System
