The question is no longer whether to move to the cloud; most agencies are already on that journey, and they acknowledge that cloud is an essential part of the modernization process. Many, however, have computing systems built over decades for very specific mission needs. Once the easy moves—like email—have happened, the path to the cloud for mission systems becomes significantly more complicated.
Depending on the size and mission of the agency, different decisions need to be made: what type of cloud: private, public, hybrid, multi-cloud? What is the best way to manage access and identity?
Security is still paramount and has challenges despite the FedRAMP certification process and the new TIC 3 policy. A workforce that depends on mobile devices needs access from anywhere. Managing who is on the network and taking human error off the table can reduce unauthorized access. But protecting the data—which is often in unstructured form and gathered from many different sources—is a different and difficult process.
And, as always, there is the question of budget and cost. Cloud is billed as the efficient way to store and access data. But agencies often don’t have an accurate assessment of how much they are currently spending and find it difficult to project the costs in the new world. Managing what staff are actually using is an essential data point to setting levels for the future.
Please join us for this deep dive into the specifics of syncing Cloud Smart goals to agency-specific missions. Topics to be addressed include:
- Examples of how agencies chose different cloud solutions
- Business drivers for different types of cloud
- New approaches to cloud security
- Advances in the FedRAMP program
- The growth of cloud native applications