Storm-related outages at an Amazon.com data centre in Virginia prompted questions Monday whether the federal government is moving too swiftly to put important data on private-sector cloud computing servers.

The outages affected companies such as Netflix and Pinterest, not the government. But several federal agencies have moved email and other services to cloud servers, which are housed at remote data centres and typically managed by technology companies such as Amazon or Google. The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on commerce, manufacturing and trade is studying the risks of such moves and hopes to schedule a hearing on the matter ahead of the August congressional recess.

"Last week's powerful thunderstorms, along with the massive disruptions they caused, exposed some of the vulnerabilities of cloud computing," the panel's chairman, Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif., said in a statement. "But I also believe the problems extend way beyond consumer convenience and customer service. There are some serious privacy issues which we need to look at as well." 

Source: The Seattle Times