US federal government really needs its own cloud computing agency full of stick-up-the-butt security and reliability fanatics. 99.999% availability. Formally

US federal government really needs its own cloud computing agency full of stick-up-the-butt security and reliability fanatics. 99.999% availability. Formally verified code everywhere. Built on a real-time OS. Guaranteed periodic permanent backups. Anything the gummint does pretty much needs to scale immediately to 400 million users, can never experience a data breach, and needs to stay available constantly, possibly for decades, or maybe even forever. The loss of the 1890 census records by fire is still significant today. If every copy of the quarterly reports for GE from 1982 were lost, the impact would be much smaller. The current cloud service offered commercially today are plenty good enough for even some of the hugest public companies, but not quite good enough for an entity with vastly different goals and needs. The different flavor of requirements might mean that private sector business will never offer a suitable class of service. Currently, some agencies run their own data centers, so the necessary expertise certainly exists, but that is not currently contributing in any way to a common infrastructure.