VA Puts E-Mail Cloud Thing On Hold

Last May, the Veterans Affairs Department put out a notice that it wanted to consolidate e-mail systems serving 600,000 mailboxes into one of those au courant computing clouds in a project called "Big 4 -- Enterprise Storage, Backup, Archive and Exchange."

But last Thursday, the VA quietly put the project on hold, citing new Office of Management and Budget cloud and data center policy issued early last month.

The VA said that it needs to cogitate on the OMB memo for a while, and plans to release a notice to industry on the direction and scope of the Big 4 project early next month.

These cloud things can get, well, cloudy at times.