As the U.S. Government contemplates stopping everything to save money and the UK Government appears to begin back-tracking on their ambitious G-Cloud, the Australians are busy getting excited about Cloud. On 12 April their Department of Defence released useful guidance on Cloud Computing Security Considerations. On 13 April their Department of Finance and Deregulation released a draft of the Government’s ICT Strategic Vision. And on 14 April, the same Department followed up with the cloud-specific Cloud Computing Strategic Direction Paper. All three documents are practical and pragmatic, and all three do a good job of steering a line between the breathless enthusiasm of the naive and the security scare stories of the stupid. Brett Winterford at iTNews takes a look at the security document, and Gartner’s Andrea Di Maio welcomes the Cloud Strategic Direction document. Like most (all?) other Governments, Australia seems keen to ensure that certain types of data do not get stored off shore. There’s clearly more work to do in understanding the real implications of territoriality and data, but in the meantime maybe Amazon et al should be looking at locating some capacity in the South Pacific?