It’s 11 p.m. Do you know where your data is? If your enterprise has transitioned to the cloud for data storage the answer almost certainly is “no.” Portions of it might be in Malaysia; other bits in Antigua. Today, governments across the globe are deeply uncomfortable with that answer -- but they don’t need to be. Just a small application of technological magic through encryption at rest can dispel concerns about data’s location.

When it comes to safeguarding electronic health records, location matters. Take the case of Alberta Health Services (AHS), a Canadian government-led authority responsible for managing the electronic health records of patients across 400 medical facilities.

Several premier cloud computing Service Providers have suffered disruptions in the past year – affecting millions of users. There are cases where a small number of users lose the capabilities of a particular service offering while the remaining users retain full functionality. For example, some Gmail disruptions have affected only a small percentage of the user base. In other cases, outages may take out a number of customer websites that rely on those services. When Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud computing infrastructure experienced a brief network outage, it knocked offline popular sites such as Foursquare, Heroku, Quora, Reddit, and Netflix that rely on the underlying AWS functionality. For private cloud-based services, any disruptions at the cloud Service Provider level can be just as traumatic.

Security and privacy concerns continue to lead U.S. federal department CIOs to choose private clouds over public clouds. For large Federal departments and their sub-agencies, private clouds can be ideal because they provide security and privacy while still yielding performance and efficiency gains. When it comes to the cloud, however, size matters. Smaller U.S. federal agencies and state and local governments may fail to achieve the economies of scale necessary for benefiting from a private cloud environment. For this reason, smaller public sector organizations with interconnected missions should consider following the German example and invest in a third type of cloud solution: the community cloud.

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.

Can the consumer product or service fully meet the unique requirements of government computing and communications? The answer is – probably not unless the solution is tuned for government use.

Cloud computing offers many compelling benefits, but organizations need to be aware of interoperability and data portability issues that may affect enterprise adoption. The ability of different IT systems and services to work together continues to be an important customer objective. Achievement of this capability will enable customer organizations to avoid vendor lock-in and control their data / services, allowing them to work seamlessly with products / services from different vendors.

SafeGov.org has released a Cloud Computing Glossary intended for readers who are looking for definitions of popular cloud computing terms.

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 killed nearly 3,000 people, injured thousands more, and destroyed billions of dollars in property. The attacks also scattered and destroyed countless hard copy files, computers, and servers, including those belonging to financial services companies, state and local government agencies, and even the Central Intelligence Agency, leading to the irrevocable loss of vital information. The tragic events of 9/11 made it evident that now, more than ever, business and government continuity depends on the resilience and integrity of information technology and data—a realization crystallized all the more in the aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina and the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

While the general perception is that a cloud is a cloud, that won’t be the case for government agencies. Experts revealed more specifics about federal, state and local migration to cloud computing during the first panel at AFCEA International’s Homeland Security Conference. Eventually a governmentwide cloud for all services and data may be created, but today, while some services can move to the cloud environment, others will require customized clouds. For example, email services are a good candidate for the cloud, but those agencies that require extra security are likely to create private clouds for data storage and exchange. The latter not only applies to the usual suspects of national security agencies but also to local and regional law enforcement agencies that need to restrict access and protect information during ongoing investigations