The GSA is setting up contract vehicles and schedules that will allow agencies to purchase commercial cloud services in a quicker and more uniform way, they explain. The website Apps.gov will provide a central point for information on this initiative. They say the GSA had already been providing federal agencies with a uniform mechanism for handling other types of contractors.

Meanwhile, NIST is defining cloud concepts, identifying standards and organizing security research.

Despite such guidance, the reality is that many federal entities aren't yet moving to the cloud.

According to MeriTalk's report, 79% of federal CIOs said their agencies aren't adopting the cloud-first policy, and only 64% are planning to embrace that approach in the next two years.

Moreover, at the time of the survey, only 17% of the federal CIOs were using infrastructure as a service, while 15% were using software as a service and 13% were using platform as a service. However, 20% said they were planning to move to infrastructure as a service, 22% were planning to start using software as a service, and 19% said they had a platform-as-a-service project in the works.