Social Security Administration's Own Private Cloud?

By CIOReview | Monday, January 27, 2014

FREMONT, CA: Social Security Administration (SSA) is planning to build its private and secure cloud and has sent out requests to interested cloud software service vendors to respond with specifications of their products which will meet the agency’s requirements. According to a report by Information Week, SSA investing for its private cloud will make it one of the biggest organizations to do so in the booming industry.

In an effort to build its own on-site private cloud, the agency is hunting for software packages which will assist the agency to use its existing infrastructure more efficiently and automate its manual processes. The software would be integrated into the SSA’s VMware server virtualization infrastructure to create a self service virtual machine (VM) provisioning portal, automate administrative tasks like VM creation, reclaim unused resources, and infrastructure maintenance tasks.

The customizable self service portal apart from allowing addition of new features while limiting functions based on user, group, or role permissions, it will also allow users to request and provision virtual resources such as virtual CPU, RAM, and storage without any assistance from infrastructure administrators. The software, which the SSA intends to integrate into its server virtualization infrastructure, should also be able to provide the capability to manage the entire lifecycle of the virtual machine, console access, resource management such as memory and storage, and also maintain complete inventory of all physical and virtual resources.

Cloud computing offers organizations and companies with benefits like agility and savings; however, this can be realized only when they have a business model which will be able to support the scale of a cloud computing platform.

By building its own private cloud, SSA can efficiently and effectively change the way it does business; however with the sensitive nature of the information that it handles, the agency will need to ensure that the public is confident that their private data is secure on the cloud and will not get stolen. This is the most important aspect of establishing a private cloud and SSA should leave no stone unturned to ensure security.

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