America in the Clouds

I was incredibly honored earlier this month to be appointed to the TechAmerica Commission on the Leadership Opportunity in U.S. Deployment of the Cloud (CLOUD2). Our mandate is to make recommendations to the Obama Administration both for how the government should deploy cloud technologies as well as for policies that might hinder U.S. leadership of the cloud in the commercial space. As we form our recommendations, we’ll be presenting to Federal CIO Vivek Kundra as well as the Secretary of Commerce.

Our mission at Synteractive is to solve the biggest problems in the world through social and technological innovation. The worldwide migration to cloud-based solutions offers tremendous opportunities—for driving innovation in a cost effective way, for architecting environments for greater cyber-security, for enabling entirely new scenarios that simply weren’t feasible before. But there are absolutely challenges.

When looking at the deployment of cloud in government, the greatest challenge that we see is ensuring that it actually delivers on the potential. There are entrenched interests within both government and industry that are desperately stirring up fear, uncertainty, and doubt about cloud while simultaneously redefining “cloud” to mean the same inefficient outsourced data centers that the large systems integrators have been managing for years. While there are legitimate issues that the industry is addressing, it will take strong leadership on the part of the Administration to ensure that citizens benefits as much as they should from the cloud.

From a commercial perspective, there are a number of policies that are creating confusion and uncertainty around America’s leadership in the cloud. For example, data privacy and data sovereignty laws and regulations vary significantly around the world. Many European countries and businesses are uncomfortable with having their data stored in American clouds because of the lack of a coherent legal framework. Given that America has the potential to dominate the competitive landscape in this area, it’s imperative that we address those policies that might hinder our position.

I’m excited to be able to make a difference by working together with an esteemed group of technologists to address these important issues.