My company has recently begun working on a project for the Arkansas Geographic Information Office (AGIO) to evaluate options for potentially migrating the GeoStor geospatial infrastructure to a cloud computing environment. If you are unfamiliar with GeoStor, it is the official geospatial platform for the State of Arkansas and is maintained by AGIO. I realize, as does AGIO, that “the cloud” has become a buzzword that has lost any meaningful context. So, for purposes of discussion, we’ll go with the NIST draft definition available here: http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/800-145/Draft-SP-800-145_cloud-definition.pdf.
For this effort, we are open to considering any service model but we have strict guidance that the only deployment model of interest is the public cloud model.