Swan Island Networks provides flexible, high-trust cloud computing platforms catered for security-conscious enterprises and government entities. Cloud computing is all the rage among big businesses but government entities, whether they be local, state or federal, have been more reluctant to jump on the bandwagon (or should we say, cloud).
Charles Jennings, CEO of Swan Island Networks, said that governments are hesitant to adapt to cloud computing for security reasons and strict procurement policies that leave out SaaS cloud services. Swan Island is hoping to be the platform for this sector by offering high-trust, heavily securitized clouds. Its cloud platform, TIES, is hoping to take government data infrastructures into cloud by offering a more agile platform that allows secure and authenticated virtualization of all data.
Implementations of TIES in putting governments’ data in the cloud have proven to be successful so far. Swan Island Networks coordinated a platform for the Tampa Bay Police for the 2009 Super Bowl which mashed up data from city and state police departments, federal agencies including the FBI and Homeland Security, local hotels and emergency services into a secure, accessible, cloud-based platform. The end result was an easier, more efficient (and successful) collaboration among several agencies, said Jennings. TIES is also being used by the Sweden’s Emergency Management Agency, and is even used on mobile applications.
The government may start listening. The Obama administration’s recent pick for Chief Intelligence Officer (who oversees policy, planning and spending for government IT infrastructure), Vivek Kundra, is a vocal proponent of cloud computing. Kundra is planning to embrace cloud computing technologies, open-source technologies and is already forming Data.gov, a website that would allows the public to see public government data.
The future of data integration seems to be in cloud computing and enterprises have been catching on. Let’s hope governments catches on.