With all the talk of cloud computing with in the U.S. Federal Government lately, it seems to be rubbing off on other governments around the globe. I've recently had conversations with the Canadian, US, UK, UN, and EU governments asking about how they might be able to investigate the creation of "public cloud computing infrastructures" for both governmental use as well as for their citizens. I'm calling this new movement toward the governmental adoption of cloud computing -- Government as a Service.

Simply Government as a Service is a way for governments around the globe to offer enabling technical services to their population. These could be as simple as web based services to complex infrastructure and platforms made available through the web and specifically to a citizen of a given country.

In a lot of ways, Government as a Service is the ultimate social program, an equalizer that enables the broader populous uniform access to emerging cutting edge technology that may otherwise be out of reach for the average person. Combined with broadband initiatives, governmental cloud computing could truly be the information revolution we've all been waiting for. If information is power, cloud computing is the tool that gives it.

• Desktone “Desktops as a Service”
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