CIA BUILDING ON A CLOUD

By M.S.Welles

One of the U.S. government's most secretive agencies, the CIA, is pinning its hopes to a cloud and adopting cloud computing in a big way.

Spokesmen for the agency say that they feel cloud computing makes IT environments more flexible and secure when kept within a firewall.

The agency has had widespread virtualization for years. Virtualization abstracts the operating system and software from the hardware, and is an excellent basis for building a cloud environment.

The CIA also uses thin clients and Web-based applications which reduces the necessity of securing individual workstations.

With the CIA cloud's use of standards-based technology, complexity is reduced and patches are deployed faster.

Since everything in a cloud environment is built on common processes, there is a consistent approach to doing things.