Moving to the cloud can increase federal agencies’ ability to handle large data sets.

The question is – which cloud? Which applications? How to make the change? Vendor lock-in is a concept many agencies have experienced and those agencies want to develop a strategy that puts the flexibility in their hands, not in the cloud vendor.

One approach is to work with a company who has years of experience in enterprise transitions. Dave Vennergrund is director of the data and analytics practice at General Dynamics Information Technology. He recently joined Federal News Radio to discuss the impact and importance of data and analytics in government.

Vennergrund began by describing how the cloud impacts data analytics.

“What is the cloud best for? Elasticity, the ability to scale on demand when needed,” he said on Agency in Focus: Data and Analytics Month.

Most agencies may want to move to the cloud but they cannot move everything. Perhaps data science can help. People with decades of experience in trying to understand patterns and anomalies in data sets are called data scientists.

“And over time I’ve been called an artificial intelligence researcher, a knowledge engineer, a data miner, and now I’m called a data scientist,” Vennergrund said on Federal Drive with Tom Temin. “They’re all good titles, but they all do essentially the same thing.”

Terms like data scientist and data analyst can get confused with the proliferation of petabytes in federal systems. In fact, this amount of information can make modernization difficult.

Existing systems can be a mess with data silos everywhere. “So many times, we are asked to come into an agency and bring data together from three, four, or even 54 source systems and to answer difficult questions,” Vennergrund said.

Artificial intelligence and even machine learning are wonderful capabilities; however, they must be used with respect to compliance and letting the agency be in control of entering and exiting the cloud.

General Dynamics Information Technology has the expertise to help agencies apply data and analytics to make innovation in data management impactful for your agency.

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