When the NASA cloud effort was launched, agency IT managers were concerned about potential vendor lock-in, and whether data could be moved to data centers of other vendors. So NASA chose to use products from multiple vendors, including Amazon's S3, Google's Cloud Service and Microsoft's Azure.

NASA set up a cloud application suitability model (CASM), which determines what application goes to which cloud.

The agency also set up a so-called "The Wheel of Security," described as similar to a pie chart that shows which data can be publicly available and which should remain top secret.

In public clouds, parts of which are accessible to the public, NASA placed high-resolution images of Mars and wrote games around them to have the public participate as "citizen scientists," he said.

For example, NASA created a Microsoft's Azure-based site called , where anyone can view the planet from a rover's point of view. On Google's Cloud Service, NASA set up a site for fourth and fifth graders to explore the galaxy.