But the panelists at the also suggested that federal CIOs have been welcoming cloud services and apps behind their agency firewalls for many of the same reasons that have motivated their counterparts in the private sector to embrace the technologyÂ?cost savings, operational efficiencies and greater flexibility chief among them.

"What we're seeing emerging ... is in the infrastructure space [and] it's white hot," says Cameron Chehreh, chief enterprise engineer at General Dynamics Information Technology. "So everyone wants to get the layer of abstraction above virtualization," he adds.

"They want the self-service, they want the rapid provisioning more because IT traditionally has had the bad rap of it takes a long time to get capability and support of a mission. That's now changing. And culturally I've seen IT departments that were traditionally a little bit more stoic becoming much more responsive and agile in their approach from an infrastructure perspective," Chehreh says.

Chehreh and speakers acknowledged that the cultural attitudes of IT workers can vary widely across the various civilian and defense agencies, just as some datasets and applications are suited for a public cloud, while others, such as classified military information, are not considered candidates for any type of cloud deployment.