Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could simply point to cloud standards and claim that such standards could reliably lubricate government adoption of safe, dependable, accreditable cloud computing?! Sadly, we cannot. At least, not yet.
And, this fact is as true for commercial adoption of cloud computing as it is for government adoption. It is also the subject of this month’s question in the Mitre Cloud Computing Forum for Government.
One of the most frequently used tools to fight forest fires is … more fire! At first blush, this approach is counter-intuitive. But, the use of “back burns” to reduce the amount of flammable material and ultimately control the fire itself is a well-known and effective technique. The irony of “fighting fire with fire” lies at the heart of this month’s (May 2010) question on the Mitre cloud computing blog:
“How could a government system be more resilient to attack if hosted on a public cloud computing model versus a private one, and what are the added vulnerabilities the government would need to consider?”
