VA on the Bleeding Edge

Jason Miller | Federal News Radio | December 23, 2010

"I know that Google has moved forward with FISMA certification of some of the stuff they are doing so that is a possibility," [Roger Baker, VA CIO] said. "The issue there is that there are various levels of certification and what they have achieved is medium and for the types of information we store, it would have to be a high certification. But we look at is there a way to embrace the tool as it stands? Is there a way to bring the tool inside the VA firewall and control access to it a bit more and meet our requirements that way?"

This will be one of the hardest issues we grapple with in the IT field: how do you secure a cloud? Asst. Secretary Baker knows this, and it will be interesting to see what he does to meet both the technical, budgetary and security/privacy requirements.