The public sector is naturally skittish about outsourcing their computing to public cloud providers, but it seems that in the U.S., many government departments are now using these services.
This article by Professional Outsourcing Magazine reports that more than 300 U.S. government departments are now using Amazon Web Services, Amazon's public cloud service. The company has tried to cater specifically to public sector clients by setting up a service called
GovCloud, which it says complies with all the necessary regulatory requirements.
The U.S. government agencies using AWS include large federal departments like the National Institutes of Health, the Treasury Department and NASA, according to the article. It also notes that Amazon has recently added new features to GovCloud, including elastic load balancing, auto-scaling and high-performance computing.