Whether you’re moving an existing application to the cloud or starting afresh on the cloud with a brand new application, CAP is an important topic to consider when (re)designing the architecture of your app. CAP stands for Consistency, Availability and Partitioning, three characteristics that are key when designing a distributed application. These three characterictics have an important bearing on the capability of your application to scale up or down with no negative impact which is a basic requirement for cloud based applications.
To sum up, CAP is an important part of any systems architecture – be it on the cloud, hosted or on-premises and the overall objective is to find and design the appropriate balance between the three requirements for your application.

In summary, this intent has been shown by the following;
The US Government has signalled a clear intention to use cloud computing services. This intention was first signalled with the release of apps.gov – a US Government portal to allow different cloud service vendor to market their offerings to the government sector and to provide information on cloud computing
A ‘cloud first’ policy is being adopted by Federal Government. This means in effect that provided security, reliability and cost-effectiveness criteria are met, Federal agencies should use cloud based services as a default.
Considering that the US Government spends $80m each year on IT related expenditure, this could be a huge investment in the Cloud.