Yesterday we reported that Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the U.S. federal government, will leave his post for a fellowship at Harvard. Kundra lead the Data.gov open data project which suffered a massive budget cut, and the White House’s cloud computing initiatives.
With the leader of two banner projects for both open data and cloud computing moving on, what does that mean for the future of these technologies?
On one hand, data.gov pales in comparison to the U.K.’s open data initiative, and many states are still releasing open data. Meanwhile, the cloud still has a strong advocate in the federal government with chief performance officer Jeffrey Zients. And iCloud may be bringing awareness of cloud computing to whole new levels, even if it does further muddy the definition of cloud computing.
On the other hand, there seems to be a growing perception that just putting open data out into the public isn’t enough, and may not be worth the trouble. Meanwhile, high profile failures like the Amazon Web Services outage and the security breaches at Sony may have damaged the public’s perception of the cloud.