U.S. State Department weighing cloud computing adoption

According to a recent Forbes blog post, officials in the U.S. State Department have been considering a shift in technology, moving toward a "cloud-first" strategy.

The post states that incorporating cloud computing has become a main objective of the department's IT strategic plan, which is aiming to maximize its utilization of the managed IT service by refining its risk management approach outlined in the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.

FedRAMP allows for multiple authorizations and continuous security monitoring services among government and commercial cloud computing systems within multi-agency use. The joint authorization of cloud providers allows the federal government to leverage a common security risk model across its systems.

The State Department is also creating a private cloud model to enhance many of its current initiatives, such as virtualization, enterprise server operations and utilization of several applications.

In all, the department expects to spend close to $1 billion on its cloud adoption and implementation, according to a recent report.