Bad Idea
Nice to see our Govt. IT strategy jumping onto the latest unproven immature hype bandwagon.
If they promise it won't be used for personal data storage then fair enough. But in my opinion the cloud is not yet proven fit for the storage of personal info for en-mass mass general business use
Cloud providers won't allow customer audit's of their facilities
Going from a small outfit to cloud massively increases the attack footprint
Plagued with uncertainties about where your data is at any one time, more specifically what legal jurisdiction it's in, and under what laws who has access to it at that moment in time
The US Patriot Act gave them rights to pretty much at whim bust down the doors of any data centre and walk out with a rack of servers for examination. Would I trust my whole business, and all it's data to an offshore cloudy data centre that i've never even seen, subject to laws I don't know or don't understand? NO WAY!
The fact that so many are jumping on this bandwagon just confirms what a bunch of herd following, trend jumping thoughtless overpaid fat cat incompetents our CIO's really are.