Enabling the Benefits of Cloud Computing in a Military Context

Cloud computing has been a topic of keen interest in recent years, having been referred to as "the emerging paradigm for the last five years", "the most promising computational platform" and "the prevailing technique for next ten years". There has been a lot of discussion as to what new opportunities it can bring to markets, what benefits it can offer, and what system development possibilities it enables for software development. In this paper we discuss cloud computing in a military context. We define the key features and characteristics of the cloud in public authority environments. We address the most essential problems and obstacles to be considered before the benefits of cloud computing can be fully enabled therein. As a solution to problems with the adoption cloud computing in public authority environments, we propose a new service model called Knowledge Management as a Service, which also improves usability. The discussion and views presented in this paper can be adopted in any organization with doubts concerning the sensitive and classified contents of current ICT systems in cloud computing.