via Federal Computer Week

At first blush, the cloud-first mandate that federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced late last year makes sense. By spurring agencies to send one application to the cloud in the next year and two more shortly after that, it offers a clear path for cutting IT costs and consolidating federal data centers — two long-standing goals of the Obama administration.

But digging deeper, agency CIOs find themselves facing a harsh reality: Are budget imperatives superseding equally valid concerns about the safety of government systems and data in today’s still-evolving cloud environments?

The answer depends in part on how quickly IT managers can enact new security techniques tailored for the cloud, some of which are still works in progress.

Story here.