There was an interesting piece in Information Week recently talking about a white paper Google had just published titled “Google Apps: Energy Efficiency in the Cloud.” While overall the paper raises some good points about how moving to a Google Apps cloud infrastructure can save money on energy costs, there are several areas worth thinking about beyond the statements in the paper.

Cloud computing for governments in the United States, especially services tailored for the federal government, may not be as efficient or as cheap as many would hope, says Richard Falkenrath, a principal with the security consultancy The Chertoff Group.

The debate about the economic benefits of cloud computing is intense, and is commonly boiled down to a talking point labelled OpEx vs. CapEx. Very often, like many talking points, the headline conflict is really a stalking horse that conceals the true source of conflict.

As IT shops accelerate their adoption of cloud services rolled out by Amazon and its major competitors, a growing number of shops say they are unable to effectively track the runaway costs of these services.This lack of visibility into the financial aspect of cloud services has led to some shops not just overpaying but overprovisioning cloud services, thereby sucking away valuable computing resources that could be dedicated to other pursuits. Over the short term, it’s a problem that figures to get worse before it gets better.

Listen to the hype about cloud computing and you’d think it provides a quick fix for the CIO who needs to cut costs in a hurry. And while its on-demand model offers the promise of reduced spend and freeing the IT team from the drudgery of looking after physical infrastructure, CIOs remain wary about getting carried away chasing savings in the cloud.

Many federal managers don't understand the platform-as-a-service cloud delivery model and how it can help agencies cut development costs by more than 50 percent, according to a new white paper by NJVC and Virtual Global.

Cloud services are proven for many business and consumer applications, but what if the problem to be solved is measuring the expansion of the universe? The U.S. Department of Energy has determined the cloud can help there too, but it won't be cheap or easy.

Virtually all defense organizations and intelligence agencies are turning toward cloud computing for everything from satellite imagery to telecom traffic to Web content. For these applications and many others, the focus is on building private cloud systems that can cost effectively store and efficiently distribute multiple petabytes of data to endpoints worldwide.

Cloud computing is going strong, and I suspect it'll peak this year or next. I know this because the hype is almost out of control and misinformation is plentiful -- the classic signs of an impending peak. It's a new technology, but the same old hype cycle.

As policies from the new federal chief information officer, Steven VanRoekel, become better known, cloud computing technology is proving more important than ever. VanRoekel has pledged not only to continue the Cloud First policy established by his predecessor, Vivek Kundra, but also to expand it with an additional initiative known as Future First.