Agencies have different goals in moving to the cloud, but resiliency remains a key benefit in every migration.

To maximize these benefits and acquire a flexible cloud architecture, Mike Malaret, the technical director for federal at Veritas, said agencies need to map out their objectives before moving ahead with cloud migration, and come up with a strategy that achieves key milestones while also managing limited resources.

“There tends to be a little bit of a disconnect in the planning capabilities of the agencies for being able to understand what they have on-premise, what and when to move certain applications to the cloud, what the impact of that is going to be if they do that,” Malaret said on Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange.

To bridge that disconnect, Malaret said infrastructure analytics can provide a holistic view of an agency’s on-premise environment, the cloud environment and the cost — as well as the benefits of cloud migration.

“What customers are looking for is being able to be to understand better what their cloud applications are costing them. If they keep everything that is solely based upon cloud services that are available to them built and metered through the cloud, they can certainly get a pretty good accounting of what things cost,” he said.

The cloud can also help agencies in their disaster recovery planning. Malaret said a disaster recovery site not actively running is cost-effective for customers, compared to an environment that needs to run all the time.

However, Malaret said no cloud is immune from attacks, and that data is always the responsibility of the customer.

“It’s really important for customers to make sure that they do put in a strategy that is effective for them, to make sure that they have ownership of their data, as well as can guarantee the integrity of it, regardless of what changes happen within the world,” he said.

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