Cloud Computing: U.S. intelligence agencies embrace OpenStack

Grazed from ITWorld. Author: Nancy Gohring.

The U.S. National Security Agency has been “transformed” since implementing OpenStack, and now the agency plans to open its experiences to all 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community. “Over the next few months we’ll work with the larger intelligence community to roll out systems across the community,” said Nathanael Burton, a computer scientist with NSA, during a keynote at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. “Hopefully we’ll be giving access to our OpenStack system to the rest of the [intelligence community] so they can leverage the same efficiencies.”

It wasn’t immediately clear if other agencies have committed to building their own OpenStack clouds or if they plan to use the NSA’s. But government organizations are notoriously difficult to crack so the NSA’s successful implementation could open the door to broad usage of the cloud technology in the U.S. federal government. It’s also good news for OpenStack users. Since the NSA has very strong security requirements, it developed a number of systems for securing APIs and guest OSes and putting SSL “everywhere,” Burton said. “I hope in the future to take what we learned from securing OpenStack and release that back to the community,” he said…

Because of the sensitive nature of the NSA’s work, Burton said he couldn’t reveal specifics like the number of servers, storage capacity or apps used in the OpenStack cloud. But he had plenty to share about how the group implemented the cloud and how it changed the way the agency works…

Read more from the source @ http://www.itworld.com/cloud-computing/352875/us-intelligence-agencies-go-openstack