"We've seen movement both in private cloud and public cloud," says Susie Adams, chief technology officer for .

Adams and others noted that government clients are increasingly looking to commercial cloud services both for infrastructure functions like computing power and storage, and applications such as email and collaboration or CRM-like tools to deliver better citizen services.

In part, that gradual shift has come at the direction of the White House, which has instructed all agencies to prioritize cloud applications and services ahead of traditional technologies when they are considering new IT projects.

The so-called cloud first policy comes alongside other initiatives to develop standards for cloud computing, formulate policies for deploying mobile technologies, and efforts to address security concerns associated with the cloud, among other programs.