The General Services Administration and White House Office of Management and Budget on Tuesday will unveil a federal cloud computing initiative, the centerpiece of which will be a new Web site, Apps.gov -- an online storefront for agencies to acquire and purchase cloud computing services in an efficient, effective way. Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, GSA CIO Casey Coleman, and GSA Associate Administrator David McClure will brief reporters on the project during an afternoon teleconference.

Coleman spoke at an August conference about the potential of scalable and virtualized resources on the heels of a solicitation for cloud storage, Web hosting and virtual machine services. During her speech, she said agility is first and foremost about giving organizations the ability to rapidly and inexpensively change resources. Cost is greatly reduced since capital expenditures for IT are converted to operational expenses and, since systems are accessed using a Web browser, resources can be used anywhere, she said.

Furthermore, cloud computing improves reliability and security and is environmentally sensitive and energy efficient, Coleman said in prepared remarks at a business conference focused on customer relationship management. "The days of developing massive agency-focused IT infrastructure projects are long gone," she said. "We can try new things, and if they work, great. If not, lessons are learned. If there's an advantage to doing this in a government environment, it's that we are mission driven, not profit driven."