How NASA Launched Its Web Infrastructure Into The Cloud

Among U.S. government agencies, the adoption of cloud computing hasn’t been moving full steam ahead, to say the least. Even though 2011 saw the Obama administration unveil the cloud-first initiative that called for government agencies to update their old legacy IT systems to the cloud, it hasn’t been the case that these agencies have made great strides in modernizing their infrastructure.

In fact, a September 2014 U.S. Government Accountability Office report on federal agencies and cloud computing explained that while several agencies boosted the amount of IT budget cash they spend on cloud services since 2012 (the GAO studied seven agencies in 2012 and followed up on them in 2014), “the overall increase was just 1 percent.” The report stated that the agencies’ small increase in cloud spending compared to their overall budget was due to the fact that they had “legacy investments in operations and maintenance” and were not going to move those over to the cloud unless they were slated to be either replaced or upgraded.

But there’s at least a few diamonds in the rough. The CIA recently found a home for its cloud on Amazon Web Services. And, in 2012, NASA contracted out with cloud service broker InfoZen for a five-year project worth $40 million to migrate and maintain NASA’s web infrastructure — including including NASA.gov — to the Amazon cloud...