This content is provided by ThunderCat Technology.

The federal government’s move to cloud significantly predates the COVID-19 pandemic. But the pandemic has had a profound impact on the drivers behind cloud adoption and the highest priority use cases. As of right now, the three use cases that are the greatest priorities of the current administration, and thereby the greatest opportunities for cloud adoption, are public health, election security and climate research.

The pandemic drove workers out of offices and into their homes, necessitating a massively scaled reevaluation of network infrastructure, security and the tools we needed to collaborate. And that’s not going to change anytime soon. Experts all agree the hybrid workforce is here to stay. That means employees and customers are going to continue to need decentralized access to data and capabilities. How data travels is just as important, if not more so, than where it’s stored.

“Now the customer is moving more and more of their workloads into infrastructure and platform as a service. So TIC 3.0’s purpose is to govern how federal agencies set up their networks to secure the traffic,” said Nic Perez, chief technology officer for cloud at ThunderCat Technology. “And then obviously, the data that’s moving across it. And what’s important is that the use cases have significant downstream effects on the requirements — what they look to procure from the cloud. So the requirements that they’re putting together for Trusted Internet Connections 3.0 do determine from a security perspective what stays on premise. It’s helping define architectures on workloads that are appropriate for what level of cloud and what level of security controls that you actually need.”

And that’s important as the federal government marches toward its mandated adoption of zero trust architectures. Agencies have until fiscal 2024 to do that, and Perez said the easiest way to do that is through cloud adoption and use of the tools that are built in platforms such Amazon Web Services provide capabilities like credentialing and visibility across the network.

Critical use cases for secure cloud

That will also enable improved election security, Perez said. Cloud services can allow government to improve the resiliency of election security by enabling voting via mobile devices, using newer factors of authentication than physical identification that are still fundamentally secure, like biometrics. That kind of authentication goes hand in hand with zero trust.

Public health is also driving research and data analytics in a way that’s never been quite so transparent to the public. Federal agencies have massive programs in place around health surveillance, tracking and storage of health-related data to continue managing the pandemic. That’s necessitated increased capabilities for compute and storage to handle all of that data and accessibility to make it available to all stakeholders who need it.

Many times, that requires the ability to surge capacity as needed, rather than purchasing the capacity on premise and letting it sit unused except during peaks. That’s why AWS offers its Storage Gateway solution.

“It’s a FedRAMP-compliant hybrid cloud storage service for on prem that offers practically unlimited storage. So you can do long-term backups. You can reduce that on-prem storage need with a file share that’s backed up in the cloud,” Perez said. “And then there’s the cloud burst. When I need capacity, I can go into the cloud, consume it and then can turn it off.”

Perez made an analogy to using rental cars. “If I need a car, I get a rental car. I use it, I consume it, and then I drop it back off — that kind of a burst,” he said. “And you can use different types of rental cars. You can have a convertible, you can have an SUV, you can have whatever you need for whatever your kind of use cases. This ability to burst is a great one for when you’re processing large amounts of data like data lakes, data warehouses and business intelligence. You’re only paying for what you consume while you need the extra capacity.”

Optimizing store and compute

Right-sizing your capacity is important, Perez added. Although climate research is necessitating greater use of storage and accessibility to data across the public and private sectors, as well as academia, it’s also driving a call for greater sustainability in these operations.

Data centers are incredible consumers of electricity. Consolidating and shifting workloads to the cloud can help reduce that footprint, he said. That’s why AWS offers options like Amazon Outpost, which runs in your rack and provides cloud as a managed service, for when you need cloud capacity without sacrificing the security of on-prem. There’s also the Amazon Snow family products, which come in much smaller form factors and can run cloud services in edge locations and small offices, only sending back relevant data and reducing the need for centralized storage and compute.

“The key aspect here is within the fleet, you’re optimizing that particular environment. You’re serving your customer fast enough but directly in line, so you’ll save money and be more sustainable,” Perez said. “And ultimately, the servers will be using less power and generating less heat.”

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