As agencies move to the cloud it's unclear whether cloud brokers are acting on their behalf or on behalf of cloud providers, said Hamid Ouyachi, chief technology officer at the Labor Department.

The recently revived debate over the UK's draft communications data bill and its so-called snoopers' charter raises justifiable concerns about government attempts to monitor citizens' internet browsing behaviour and email correspondence with the cooperation of private companies.

Cloud computing, identified by the White House as a chief priority for the federal government, is slowly gaining traction throughout the agencies, which CIOs are steering toward a point where unique, mission-critical applications will join commodity functions like email in the cloud, federal IT executives said Thursday during a panel discussion here at a government cloud computing conference.

Technology companies are moving rapidly to get tools like email and document creation services into schools. This link to a recent survey of schools in the UK shows that use of such technology is expected to bring significant educational and social benefits. However, it also reveals that schools have deep concerns that providers of these services will mine student emails, documents or web browsing behaviour to build profiles for commercial purposes, such as serving advertisements.

With the agencies of the federal government in various stages of shifting their IT operations to the cloud, CIOs must take a considered approach that places cloud computing in the context of a host of other factors, chiefly the agency mission, but also the prevailing currents that are reshaping the technology landscape, a top analyst with Gartner said on Thursday.

A new survey of UK schools shows cloud computing adoption on the rise, but strong objections to mining data of schoolchildren, warns Jeff Gould

A new report by an Internet industry forum has shed some interesting light on the use by schools of Cloud computing services for their students. While concluding that there has been a rapid acceleration in take-up of these services the report highlights a number key privacy concerns surrounding the practice.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”) loves its “Special Publications” the way IRS agents love new tax forms. NIST’s SP’s, however, are much more useful, and its latest Special Publication release in draft form for public comment, SP 500-299 “Cloud Computing Security Reference Architecture” introduces NIST’s Cloud Computing Security Reference Architecture (“SRA”) as the latest piece in NIST’s broader cloud computing review.

Both users of bMail and the campus itself have never received a clear answer to a simple question: Is Google subjecting data in Google Apps for Education to data analysis or mining for purposes unnecessary for technical rendition of service?

The potential for reduced costs is causing cloud computing to gain momentum in the government and education space. "I'm seeing SaaS offerings growing rapidly, driven by the education software developers seeing an opportunity to gain new customers," said Jay Kirby, vice president of networking at Lumenate, Inc., a Dallas-based channel partner. "We're also seeing many of our clients re-architecting their infrastructure to take advantage of SaaS and cloud-type offerings. It's largely about speed of deployment and flexibility in getting to applications."