Kemp and Bourgeois also raised concerns that U.S. government agencies are each starting to contract with cloud vendors, instead of working together. "Without scale, and a lot of it, this is not going to be successful," Bourgeois said.

During an earlier speech, Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst encouraged government agencies to work together and build their own clouds as a way to get started in cloud computing. The government may have security concerns about turning over its data to private vendors, but government agencies could avoid several regulatory issues by running their own clouds, he said.

"If there's ever a good place to do it, it's here," Whitehurst said in an interview. "The federal government could run the biggest cloud ever."