IBM Jumps Into Government Cloud Computing

InformationWeek: IBM has announced two new initiatives that will bring new cloud computing opportunities to government offices. First, the Federal Community Cloud will provide a new infrastructure as a service offering to federal government agencies. The new service will allow agencies to move their IT development and testing to the cloud, and it could provide overflow computing capacity when systems experience a surge in demand.

Second, IBM also announced Municipal Shared Services, a new pilot program which well try to solve some of the IT problems faced by local governments. It will help municipalities migrate some of their applications to the cloud and provide them the ability to share data between applications for a more comprehensive picture of what's happening in a given community.