US governments view on Cloud Computing

Here is an interesting viewpoint on cloud computing from an actual large scale buyer,the US govt, as compared to vendors who corrupt the definition of CC to align with their product/service positioning. The view points have varied from as diverse as - James Governor calling -"If there is a consultant in the room it is not a cloud" and Mckinsey saying that only the IaaS piece is cloud computing.

The US Govt issued an RFI for procurement of Infrastructure as a Service and articulated a very clear definition of the cloud and what they are looking for.

Here is what the Fed say's :
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"Cloud computing is a pay-per-use model for enabling available, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model promotes availability and is comprised of five key characteristics, three delivery models, and four deployment models."

They go on to describe the 5 key characteristics of
On-demand self-service , Ubiquitous network access , Location independent resource pooling , Rapid elasticity and Pay per use.

the Delivery models of SaaS , Paas and Iaas and the Deployment models of Private , Community, Public and Hybrid Clouds.
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I like their view point as it is an inclusive definition and does not restrict to Infrastructure only while also preserving the key tenets of CC like pay-per-use , location independence and rapid elasticity.

Seems like they are asking the right questions and are actually ahead of the Enterprise's in their thinking. The cool thing about this RFI is that it will potentially serve as a template for other Large Enterprises for procurement of Cloud Services. Funny how the govt has is becoming the leader in tech adoption in 2009 .