It seems clear enough that the appropriate question concerning government IT is no longer if the agencies will move their computing operations to the cloud, but when, and what bumps they will encounter — or steer around — on their way there.

For government, as in industry, privacy and data security are paramount.

The transition to the cloud is already well underway in federal IT circles and with it, folks like John Kropf, the deputy chief privacy officer at the Department of Homeland Security, are spending long hours developing policies and safeguards to keep sensitive data secure as the traditional silos of federal IT infrastructure are torn down.

“With government moving to the cloud, what are the privacy implications going to be for that move?” Kropf said Wednesday at a panel discussion at Digital Capital Week, a 10-day series of event focused on technology, policy and innovation. “The government privacy community supports this move to the cloud if you can do it in a privacy-sensitive manner.”

Kropf explained that government privacy officials are applying the basic principles embedded in the decades-old Privacy Act to the transition to the cloud.

Those precepts entail firm security standards, as well as policies to keep data collection to the bare minimum, and to ensure that the information that is collected is only used for the intended purpose, preventing what Kropf called “mission creep.”

The cloud computing directive comes from the White House. Since his earliest days in a newly created office, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has been talking about modernizing government IT, from the applications in use to the infrastructure, to bring it more in step with the private sector.

via Can Federal Data Privacy Live On in the Cloud? – www.esecurityplanet.com.