FAA has looked at clouds from both sides now

The agency responsible for navigating U.S. air traffic through real clouds is moving into the world of virtual cloud through a 10-year, $108 million services integration contract.

The Federal Aviation Administration said on Aug. 28 that it signed a deal with CSC Government Solutions to lead a cloud services integration effort that will also include Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and other leading cloud providers.

According to the FAA, the program with CSC will be rolled out in phases over the next year or so, with work to assess and evaluate all existing applications starting immediately, to determine whether they’re suitable for cloud services.

Cloud-based services, said the agency, will give it on-demand, pay-per-use computing and data storage over a secure federal telecommunications infrastructure connection, moving it away from agency-owned data centers to outsourced locations.