And with Amazon's S3 cloud, NASA set up a crowdsourcing website that offers contests for developers to write code to help drive Mars rovers.

"We stored and ran everything in Amazon's public cloud so now we have tons of code we can use," he said.

NASA also uses clouds for high performance computing and for a virtual desktop infrastructure pilot program.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin built a private cloud for the agency in its data center. The private cloud uses technology from CSC's Terremark cloud, RackSpace, Univa as well as Amazon's virtual private cloud.

The process for ensuring security was turned on its head in the cloud project, Soderstrom said.