Technology sure does make strange bedfellows.
The federal government’s newest cloud service provider is one that may elicit surprise. It’s the same agency that oversees farm policy and food safety – the US Department of Agriculture.
The USDA has been certified to provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platforms as a Service (PaaS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, a rigorous security-approval program overseen by the General Services Administration. The USDA now offers FedRAMP-certified cloud services to other federal agencies, as well as to state and local government, via its National Information Technology Center.
It’s the latest example of an emerging cloud model, called shared clouds, in which one government agency gets the most from its data center resources by making them available to other agencies, according to an article on Forbes.com. The USDA offers virtualized desktops and servers, storage, networking, databases, and content management as cloud services.