From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 68

from this view that federal IT planners rank big data among the major
attractions of cloud computing. Data centers are intended to be not only
storage warehouses that agencies can call on when they need data, but
also active producers of information that draw on stored data sets (Page
2011). In 2011 NIST released its report deining cloud computing and
carefully describing the cloud's speciic characteristics to enable managers
and staff operating within agencies to have a better idea or, in some cases,
their irst clear idea of what it was they were being ordered to implement.
In 2012 the National Science Foundation (NSF 2012) produced a short
report supporting NIST's conclusions and committing the government to
fund research into cloud computing. The combination of strong afirma-
tions from the federal government's CIO, from NIST, and from the NSF
provided the grounding for strong state support for the cloud.
There are also major implications in a number of government demon-
stration projects in education and research. One of the most signiicant is
a program operated out of the National Endowment for the Humanities
Ofice of Digital Humanities. It demonstrates how government's use of
the cloud and big data is contributing to the restructuring of education,
and not just in the areas where we would expect change, such as computer
science and the disciplines associated with the sciences. It is also reaching
into the social sciences and even the humanities. One can learn a lot about
the direction of change from the size of a force creating it, but one can
also learn a great deal from its reach, as when government projects extend
to ields traditionally kept outside the scope of computerization. Chapter
5 examines the digital humanities in the context of assessing big data in
the cloud. Sufice it to say here that the digital humanities project repre-
sents an important initiative that is often lost in the understandable focus
on larger military and civilian projects. Its signiicance for the future of
education and research far outweighs the size of its budget (Gold 2012).
In spite of the enthusiasm for the cloud in government, there remain
several issues that have the military and intelligence sectors especially con-
cerned about moving data to corporate-owned cloud systems. Arguably
the most important is security. At the very least, there is concern about
moving classiied data and computer power essential for combat missions
to off-site locations. Formal concerns have already been raised with respect
to the security of data in NASA's cloud systems (Kerr 2013). Furthermore,
the size and complexity of government and especially military computer
systems make the prospect of moving to the cloud very expensive. It would