10 Cloud Computing Companies to Watch
Cloud Computing Confusion Reigns in U.S. Government

The U.S. General Services Administration last week issued a request for quotations (RFQ), a 19-page document that details the qualifications cloud computing vendors must meet to offer services to the federal government.

"Cloud computing is a major feature of the president's initiative to modernize information technology," the document says.The government is looking for cloud-based virtual machines, storage and Web hosting capabilities, and spells out several dozen requirements. For example, the GSA is demanding service availability of 99.95% per month, a level met by some but not all service-level agreements (SLA) currently offered by cloud vendors.

Amazon's cloud-based Simple Storage Service offers only 99.9% uptime, for example. Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, its virtualized server offering, promises 99.95% uptime, but calculates uptime based on the whole year rather than individual months. That means uptime could fall below the promised level for an entire month without customers becoming eligible for service credits.

GoGrid, another vendor that offers virtual servers and storage capacity over the Web, has an SLA promising 100% uptime.

The RFQ defines cloud computing as "a model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services)."

The request is part of an initiative to build a "cloud computing storefront" site, which will let government users buy infrastructure-as-a-service offerings through a common Web portal managed and maintained by the GSA.

The government wants to start out with "low impact" systems, rather than mission-critical applications.

In addition to high uptime, the government is looking for extensive self-service attributes, saying users should be able to "unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service's provider." Users should be able to provision and release cloud services with minimal management effort, in other words.

The services should also be available on mobile phones and PDAs, in addition to PCs, laptops and thin clients, the RFQ states.The RFQ says cloud vendors should meet several security requirements, including data isolation in a multi-tenant environment, disaster recovery capabilities, and allow the government to remotely control the service's firewall.

"The contractor shall implement a firewall policy that allows the government to administer it remotely, or the contractor shall administer a firewall policy in accordance with the government's direction, allowing the government to have read-only access to inspect the firewall configuration," the document states.