Q&A: Adrian Gardner, CIO, NASA Goddard Flight Center

In recent times, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been actively pursuing new, more powerful and cost-effective ways to deliver its vast amounts of data across its networks of scientists and engineers, as well as share its discoveries with the rest of the world. That’s why the space agency has been aggressively adopting the cloud model – both from within its own data centers and with outside partners – to increase its computing power.

NASA provided the genesis for the open-source cloud platform, OpenStack, originally created as the agency’s Nebula Cloud project and now hosted at RackSpace. 
I recently had the opportunity to talk with Adrian Gardner, chief information officer of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who also has been active in formulating the Society for Information Management’s cloud research. He provides background on NASA’s move to the cloud:

SP: How is cloud changing the corporate culture of NASA? Are you achieving more flexibility?