Representatives from 10 states and localities met with some of the technology industry’s biggest service providers last week to start bringing government purchasing rules in line with an increasingly cloud-based world.

In many cases, procurement laws haven’t kept pace with the rapid emergence of hosted applications and platforms, making it difficult for public agencies to adopt these solutions. Among issues targeted by the group were mitigating the risks associated with cloud implementations in a way that balances the needs of agencies and contractors, and insuring that hosted deployments comply with state and local data protection and privacy laws.

The meeting, held Jan. 14 in Trenton, N.J., was the first in a series of discussions that will be hosted by e.Republic’s Center for Digital Government. Meetings will continue throughout 2014 to identify areas of commonality between government and industry and to address disagreements. The group will issue an initial report on its activities next month.

State government participants included Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington. Local participants were Austin, Texas; Oakland County, Mich.; and Fairfax County, Va. Companies involved are Amazon, AirWatch, Dell, Deloitte, EMC, General Dynamics, SalesForce, Symantec, Unisys, Verizon-Terremark and Workday.