There's a Cloud on the Horizon

We talked about data being stored in a cloud a couple of weeks back and that issue has become more relevant today. A former US government official started to get the US government to use cloud computing and is pushing to continue that project even today. He says that the main reason they need to go forward with using cloud computing is that the information technology costs of the US are the highest and since government needs to cut its spending, this is one of the ways to do it. They started with the agriculture department and other nonsensitive areas by paying companies like Amazon and Google to host their data. They were able to save money by transferring the data hosting so that would be a good pro if they ever decided to host the government's entire data on the cloud.

The main concern is defense an looking for security data and how sure are they that it would not be subject to security breaches. Well, their government is always being hacked anyway so I think the answer could be, "We have a high level security system but we can never guarantee 100% of anything." BUT... I don't think that would reassure the US Government since it is after all paranoid about these things so I doubt they will ever be completely comfortable with it. These data banks will always be open to breach at one point or another. Nothing is completely secure because there will always be some technical glitch or a hacker out there trying to break the code. Their government could always just try to invent code to make it more secure everyday.

This makes me jealous of why our country still doesn't even have a fully functional government network system despite our being in the 21st century. Are we doomed to be third world country when government services cannot even be offered online just because of bureaucracy? Other countries are already looking for the next big thing to carry out their already big thing. How can we be always 60 years behind? Contracts like the ZTE-NBN deal were supposed to help our information technology department and improve government and yet, we all know what happened there.

Our country is getting left behind and I don't think our government even cares that much. Indeed, ours is a sad reality.

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