At the July 15 NDU Cloud Computing Symposium, Vivek Kundra (Federal CIO) strongly endorsed the creation of a government Cloud Storefront. This Storefront (run by GSA) will make Cloud resources (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) available to government agencies. Centralized access points for procuring Cloud resources are being considered by several other governments including the United Kingdom G-Cloud app store and the Japanese Kasumigaseki Cloud .
There are strong initial efficiency benefits (reduced procurement time and costs) gained by providing government projects with controlled access to multiple Cloud resources. However unless a set of best practices are followed, there could be negative long-range results such as lack of portability and interoperability across Cloud deployments. On September 21, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) will host an open free Session on "Best Practices for Cloud Storefronts" at its Virginia Plenary. The focus will be on recommended minimal standardizations (and compliance tests) for Cloud resources that are included in Storefront. Government IT leaders (e.g. GSA) will be invited to participate in the Session.
I don't think the US Federal Gov App store requires standardization so much as transparency into the underliying processes that support the so called "running" of the goverments app store.
Some thoughts that come to mind include, who exactly is building this app store, how will it be managed, what oversight will it have and how can we prevent abuse (halliburton style contracts anyone?) or even Apple's Iphone app store style "vendor lockout". These are much more important questions that need to be addressed first.
+1
Attempting to fix government procurement using government procurement
to pick a solution... oh the humanity.
a