As more federal agencies shift toward cloud-based services, chief information officers (CIOs) need to take a strategic approach to cloud that includes strong consideration of the agency’s mission, a top Gartner (News - Alert) analyst said during a recent federal cloud conference in Washington, D.C.

For example, Department of Defense (DOD) officials are looking to balance efficiency, effectiveness and security while moving away from its decentralized network of computer servers and data centers and into cloud computing. Like other government agencies, the DOD’s cloud computing strategy has centered on a number of smaller, specific private clouds. But with emerging technologies and tightening budgets, cloud is quickly gaining traction in the public sector as a savvy IT approach.

Primarily due to privacy concerns and compliance regulations, government entities have typically deployed private clouds. But a recent Gartner study found that decision-makers are growing more comfortable with public and hybrid cloud models, and are shifting away from purely private clouds.

Taking a hybrid approach to IT helps agencies meet business objectives while tapping into the transformative potential of social, mobile and the information insights to be derived from big data, according to David Cearley, a fellow and vice president with Gartner.

In addition to security, cost is another major consideration CIOs look at when evaluating whether cloud computing is right for their organization. But Cearley maintains that cloud is not the cost-saver that it’s made out to be in the mainstream media.

“Don’t just assume cloud is cheaper. You’ve got to have mechanisms to evaluate the life cycle cost over time, and sometimes even if it isn’t cheaper, it makes sense to do it anyway, because the number one issue with cloud is agility,” Cearley said during the conference, according to a recent CIO report.

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As for security concerns, which is typically the biggest inhibitor for cloud adoption in the public sector, many cloud vendors have stronger data-center security than midsize government agencies and enterprises, explained Cearley.

“Cloud services are not inherently more or less secure than traditional outsourcing,” he said. While security is important, at least 50 percent of the time when people raise security as an issue what it really means is job security, Cearley maintained.

With the Federal CIO Council charging the government with leveraging cloud computing services to reduce costs and provide greater efficiencies, more federal agencies are shifting toward using cloud computing technologies to help them focus on critical tasks while reducing information technology costs, such as communications.

As more U.S. agencies consider a hybrid Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) GovCloud and all U.S. AWS regions recently received an “Agency Authority to Operate” (ATO) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements at the “moderate impact level,” TMCnet reported.

FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. More than 300 U.S. government agencies already use an array of AWS services.

Gartner recently predicted that by 2016, public cloud infrastructure will include and be mandated to critical national infrastructure regulations by the U.S.