GiGi Schumm,
Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector, Symantec Corp.

It provides tremendous opportunity for the public sector to deliver services for the people, reduce the cost of   government operations and make more effective use of taxpayer dollars. It’s really a very nascent area and still at the very early stage, but it’s one where we do see promise.  There’s just not a ton of examples yet.

Cash-for-clunkers was one early example. That was a collaboration between the public and private sectors, it was cloud-based and consumers could get online and find information about the program and what cars were available and what dealerships had them.

Tom Ruff,
Vice President, Public Sector, Akamai Technologies, Inc.

When government agencies collaborate with each other or with citizens they can accomplish things that they couldn’t otherwise do individually. The cloud really fosters a unique environment that allows individuals and teams to solve problems faster and with a greater degree of accuracy.  Whether it’s a team of subject matter experts addressing the Gulf oil spill or a group of citizens providing feedback on a government initiative, government is key.

Organizations can get a real-time response through a distributed collaboration solution which will be more effective than putting people on planes or having conference calls. This allows experts around the world to participate in the session, provide their expert and to collaborate together. I don’t know how else you could achieve a more powerful problem-solving capability than cloud collaboration.

Richard W. Johnson,
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions

I think that collaboration is really a cultural challenge, not a technical challenge. The agencies have to be motivated to collaborate and that has been a challenge across federal government. But I do think cloud-enabled collaboration can be focused on some very specific key missions, such as better command and control, better support for the DOD and warfighters, and perhaps better intelligence gathering and dissemination.

The cloud is an enabler. It will help you plan and improve your collaboration with activities such as applications development. When you put the changes in place to overcome those cultural challenges you can generate and deliver applications faster using the cloud.

However, there are some technical challenges with cloud-to-cloud coordination. If you’re going to have multiple clouds, there is a technical issue with cloud-to-cloud interoperability. Standards organizations such as the Cloud Security Alliance, are working to address this challenge.