Robert Duffner Interviews Chris Kemp, NASA, and Kevin Jackson, NJVC, on GovCloud

Recently, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mr. Robert Duffner, director of Product Management for Windows Azure, as part of his “Thought Leaders in the Cloud” series. In this interview, we discussed:

• Actual government IT successes, especially using cloud computing
• Deconstructing the hype around cloud computing and talking about its real characteristics and value
• How clouds need a critical mass to function and provide elasticity, and how the size of the US places it in a strong position to develop these kinds of clouds
• Industry transition from system integration to service integration
• Use of clouds among defense departments and other organizations with other high security requirements
• Synergy between cloud computing and geospatial data

I was honored to follow Mr. Chris Kemp, NASA CTO, in this series.  During his interview with Robert, they discussed:

• Mandate to consider cloud computing for every major government IT project
• “Be a Martian” – NASA using Windows Azure to let students classify craters
• Opportunity for government to use more open source rather than write as much in-house
• Security concerns around government data
• Inter-country collaboration on cloud computing initiatives
• Gartner blog post titled, “Do Government Clouds Make Any Sense?”
• Collaboration with Microsoft Research on public/private cloud hybrid
• NASA is leading the charge towards cloud computing and modern IT for government

I urge you to take the time to read both of these thoughtful interviews.

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