CSC and Terremark target US Government with Cloud Computing

Today’s announcement by CSC reinforced the strong wave of cloud computing towards the Federal space. Ranked by Washington Technology Magazine as 9th largest (by contract dollar value) government contractor, this practically guarantees a bloody battle over the Federal cloud market.

“Together, CSC and Terremark will offer cloud services that include computing, storage and disaster recovery/continuity of operations that are delivered from a highly secure and reliable environment, located at Terremark’s datacenter in Culpeper, Va.

‘Terremark and CSC look forward to delivering a portfolio of cloud computing resources that will allow our government customers to implement IT services for mission-critical applications in minutes, not days,” said Jamie Dos Santos, president and chief executive officer of Terremark Federal Group. “Instead of buying costly, cumbersome hardware, this offering provides the customer access to a resource pool of processing, storage and networking that can be provisioned on demand, all from Terremark’s state-of-the-art facility in Culpeper, ensuring the security and reliability of the customer applications and data.'”

While this offering seems similar to the earlier Apptis/Servervault Fedcloud initiative, I expect that this move will force all the other large FSIs to quickly launch “cloud computing products” of their own.

While many will see these types of offering as thinly veiled datacenter outsourcing products, I do appreciate these cautious first steps for what they are and really look forward to the appearance of more aggressive cloud computing offerings in the near future.