Information Week reported on federal officials testifying to the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity this week that the government should have confidence in federal data being moved to the cloud. A number of representatives in Congress expressed their concern over cloud computing not being entirely safe for federal information.
“You’ve got to have a promise that the security of the cloud is going to be measurably better than the security we have in the current system,†said Rep. Dan Lungren, committee chairman.
Associate Administrator for the General Services Administration‘s Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies Dave McClure agreed with Lungren and said the federal government is working to accomplish a better security system in the cloud.
Department of Homeland Security CIO Richard Spires told the committee cloud computing is needed for the federal government to achieve cost-cutting goals and to keep up with the technology trends. “Cloud computing is going to transform IT as things become more commoditized,” he added. “We need to move to it.”
The FedRAMP program is what federal officials will be using to implement cloud computing throughout federal agencies. Information Week reported the program centralizes security for cloud computing and addresses three critical problems.
Those issues include setting up baseline and security controls and continuous monitoring requirements, Â maintaining assessment criteria for the security of cloud systems and maintaining an active inventory of approved systems, as laid out by McClure during the committee meeting.
