Federal leaders cannot escape The Cloud.

It’s possible every conference on any federal leader’s 2012 calendar offered at least one session on the topic for very good reason.
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This is the fourth in a seven-part series of AOL Gov’s Best Of 2012
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The Department of Veterans Affairs will stand up a series of cloud-based internal and external mobile apps in January and has planned a department-wide, cloud computing based email and calendaring infrastructure for the agency’s 600,000 users.

The intelligence community is developing a single cloud computing network to allow all its analysts to access and rapidly sift through massive volumes of data. When fully complete, this effort will create a pan-agency cloud, with organizations sharing many of the same computing resources and information. More importantly, the hope is the system will break down existing boundaries between agencies and change their insular cultures.

One of several predictions for 2013 is that cloud sharing among federal, state and local governments as well as shared services will account for 18% of the government cloud market and create new business models for IT procurement and provisioning.

It’s all in the name of better, faster and cheaper.

But there are many kinks to work out with regard to cybersecurity. And complications of cloud adoption within federal agencies are one of many reasons for proposed legislation to increase CIO authority. This story will definitely continue to ramp up next year.