When the industry first began discussing the hybrid cloud computing model back in 2008, cloud computing purists pushed back hard. After all, they already thought private clouds were silly and a new, wannabe-hip name for the data center. To them, the idea of hybrid clouds that used private clouds or traditional computing platforms was just as ridiculous.

Private and community clouds best fit the IT needs of public administrations, says the EU's cyber security agency.

Public cloud computing carries with it great promise and great risk. Enterprises are hesitant to get on board, despite continuous advice last year from industry experts to embrace it rather than ban it. Departments and divisions are provisioning their own IT services from the cloud with a credit card — a shadow process that in itself is a risk.

Cloud computing offers a powerful complement to the more established IT solutions federal agencies have long used to conduct their operations. In the right circumstances, it holds the potential to deliver significant cost savings through resource sharing and elimination of redundancies. It also can offer instant scalability to meet expected or unexpected surges in demand. But the acquisition of cloud solutions represents a new approach that brings with it a host of new considerations for government CIOs.

The federal government is fundamentally changing the way it operates. We are confronted with system-wide challenges ranging from the economy, the environment, to health care, etc. Therefore, our public infrastructure is not performing adequately and there are operational and public safety risks. Such challenges have forced the Federal government to take a front and center role in working across the public, private, and academic sectors to solve massively complex and cross-disciplinary, interdependent problems.