America’s defence department moves towards cloud computing

We are all aware of the United States military, and that it is the largest in the world. It has a budget of over £340 billion and employs in excess of 3 million people. 1.5 million of those people are in active duty, or regular military personnel.

Of course, such a large organisation will have a monumental IT infrastructure as well as some of the tightest data security on the planet. Such an infrastructure also brings with it an inevitable large hardware stack.

Currently, the Department of Defence has some 1500 data centres which it is planning on reducing substantially.

A combination of budget cuts and security concerns has meant that the substitute for hardware has come in the form of Cloud Computing – high security Managed Servers, Cloud Hosting services and so on.

The DoD is moving towards cloud computing, using it to collect data as well as the …