Although Hewlett-Packard’s pledge to invest $1 billion in cloud services came two months after Cisco’s, a move that was itself a response to a similar commitment made by IBM back in January, it’s already lapping ahead in the hybrid computing race. The hardware maker hopes to press its advantage with a new platform aimed at delivering the kind of flexibility offered by the likes of Amazon for government agencies without the tremendous amount of risk historically involving in moving data outside the four walls of the organization.

Unveiled this morning, the Helion Managed Private Cloud for Public Sector can be implemented on-premise, hosted in a third party data center or consumed as a service, according to the company, providing a common foundation across all three. It marks another step forward in the roadmap first revealed on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at HP Discover 2013.

“We believe that the world is going to be a hybrid world,” Saar Gillai, the then head of HP’s Converged Cloud business, told hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante. “People are gonna have a hybrid environment, so when we talk about converged cloud, what we mean is that you have one architecture and one experience model across the entire gamma of deployment models, whether it’s public, private or managed.”

Like Amazon’s GovCloud environment, HP’s platform is compliant with the HIPPA privacy rules governing healthcare data, had passed the Department of Defense’s basic FedRAMP provider assessment and earned the FISMA security accreditation from the US General Services Administration.  But whereas the retail giant is only cleared to handle workloads assigned an Impact Level of 1 or 2, which cover unclassified public and unclassified private information, respectively Helion Managed Private Cloud can be used to store files with an Impact Level as high as 5, the second most sensitive category on the chart.

The appliance can be managed through a web-based portal that HP says provides a single point of control to manage and provision hardware resources. The interface also includes monitoring capabilities that make it possible to charge back costs to individual departments based on usage.

Available immediately, Helion Managed Private Cloud is being promoted under the banner of the “New Style of IT”, a tagline encompassing the convergence of cloud computing, mobility and analytics as well as the growing importance of security in the public sector and beyond. It’s HP’s response to the  “third platform for IT” message rival EMC has been pushing lately, which only explicitly addresses the former three areas.  Whether Meg Whitman’s firm and the competition will be able to deliver on their marketing promises, however, still remains to be seen.

image courtesy HP