From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 69

not be a matter of simply relying solely on available technologies because
many government departments, and especially the military and intelligence
sectors, require customized systems that are integrated within and across
units. Finally, government, and especially defense, requires a very high
level of support and, while some of the major providers have developed
excellent backup for their customers, it is uncertain whether the necessary
support is available in the current cloud industry (Gangireddy 2012).
Even in the face of these worries, the government is showing a level
of faith in private cloud companies that has surprised some experts.
This extends to using private cloud irms to provide security for the
government's systems. For example, the Naval War College awarded a
single-source contract to the SaaS vendor CloudLock to safeguard the
implementation of online tools like Google Docs and Google Drive.
Given the concern with security, one analyst responds to this use of the
cloud to protect the cloud with the conclusion that “it's remarkable that
agencies are defying conventional wisdom in this way” (Foley 2012). In
a more signiicant step, intelligence agencies are beginning to make use
of commercial cloud computing, including the public cloud, which serves
all customers. Furthermore, according to one IT leader in the intelligence
community, agencies now have enough conidence in the public cloud “to
bring some commercial cloud capabilities inside our fence lines” (ibid.).
The alternative to this use of commercial cloud services is to retain IT
activity on-site or to develop a government, military, or intelligence-agency
cloud capability. This is certainly taking place too. In 2011, Los Alamos
National Lab began providing IaaS services from its own data center and
has joined with the National Nuclear Security Administration to develop
a community cloud that extends to the entire Department of Energy
(ibid.). Of greater strategic signiicance is the Department of Defense
decision to create a military cloud as a means to fend off cyber-attacks
that have been proliferating in recent years. These include the April 2010
attack emanating from China that redirected 15 percent of Internet trafic
through China's networks for eighteen minutes and the 2011 virus attack
on U.S. drone weapons. The latter used malware to record keystrokes and
required continuous deletion and rebuilding of hard drives. To avoid these
attacks, DARPA set up Cloud to the Edge (COE) in 2011, which began
by opening a set of hotspots for secure communication. According to one
analyst, COE looks a lot like Google's suite of online services, minus the
search engine (Tanaka 2012). It is hosted on a secure system of servers