The White House has made moving to the cloud a broad IT goal. IT officials at the patent office weren't available for an interview, but the agency did respond to written questions about its plans.

The agency said its broad IT goal was "migrating dedicated, distributed systems to cloud platform." It now has dedicated specialized systems, including mainframe- and Cobol-based.

More than 60% of all its applications are processed electronically, but moving those applications and others to a cloud environment means overcoming a number of potential impediments, incuding "time, money, and keeping the legacy systems operational while replacing them all," the agency said.

Neither the project cost nor timeframe for the move to the cloud has been calculated yet. The annual IT budget for this agency is $232 million.

The plan is to create an internal cloud until there is a "federally approved and secure cloud platform available," the agency said.