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When former FCC Managing Director Steven VanRoekel prepared to take the helm as America's second Chief Information Officer, he told reporters he believed he could apply the lessons he learned as a senior director for Windows Server at Microsoft to the public sector. A new survey wishes VanRoekel good luck with that, but offers him a grim outlook on the perspectives of the federal IT workers whose policies he will help steer.

The survey is entitled, "Over to You, Mr. VanRoekel: A Federal IT Referendum on Change." Released today by the public sector IT community MeriTalk, it measures responses from some 174 IT professionals. Among them, 64% believe security issues to be among the most significant roadblocks to government adoption of cloud services. Perhaps that's not a shock, but maybe this will be: Number two on that same list of obstacles, coming in just above budget constraints, was something called "cultural issues."

Yesterday we reported that Vivek Kundra, the first CIO of the U.S. federal government, will leave his post for a fellowship at Harvard. Kundra lead the Data.gov open data project which suffered a massive budget cut, and the White House's cloud computing initiatives.

With the leader of two banner projects for both open data and cloud computing moving on, what does that mean for the future of these technologies?

The federal government is losing its first-ever chief information officer.

Vivek Kundra, the man behind Data.gov, the government IT Dashboard and the federal initiative to reduce data centers and move to the cloud, will leave his post in August, according to Politico. He is reported to be going to Harvard to join the Kennedy School and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, according to Federal News Radio. President Obama had tapped Kundra to be the first federal CIO in 2009 after he had been the chief technology officer of Washington, D.C.

This is the time of season when you can be on the road for eight weeks straight, filling up your time going to industry events and company conferences.

This is also when we get to see executives in a different mode. It's a time of year when they are on stage, trying to make their mark. It's always a show, no matter who the executive.

These are the executives who do influence the fate for how cloud infrastructures are built out and maintained. They are important to watch as their moves affect the cloud computing market.

We've written several stories in the past week about government initiatives at both the state and federal level to promote cloud computing and virtualization in the public sphere.

But is the government's move to the cloud inevitable?

Vivek Kundra is Obama's evangelist for cloud computing.

On Friday, Kundra, the White House Federal CIO, faced one of his first big tests as he testified before the U.S. Congress about cloud computing and why the Obama administration believes it's key in helping the government modernize its technology infrastructure.

To get a picture of what Kundra believes, Cloudbook featured several videos featuring the president's technology advisor. In reviewing the videos, Kundra repeats four key points about why it is critical for the U.S. Government to adopt cloud computing:

The federal government sure loves cloud computing. And now it's using the foundation it built in the cloud to create a mobile apps store for citizens and government agencies.

The federal budget for IT services has $35 million set aside for introducing mobile technologies. The money is part of a $79 billion IT budget, down from $81 billion last year.

The US Government's Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, called today for a radical new approach to government information technology, focusing on utilization of consumer-type Web 2.0 tools that can "tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country."

"We've got to recognize that we can't treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas," Kundra was quoted as saying by Government Computer News writer Wyatt Kash today. "We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country. The federal government doesn't have a monopoly on the best ideas." That's exciting, if it's more than just words.