Multicloud may be easy to talk about, but it’s complex to manage.

Agencies have a multitude of cloud service providers to choose from and varying needs from each or any of them, such as portability. That’s why they’re frequently looking for a single experience to manage them enterprisewide, said Amanda Blevins, vice president and chief technology officer for the Americas at BMC Software.

As an example, she pointed to the Navy. The service had many cloud services it needed to get a better handle on.

“We worked with AWS, another federal contractor and the U.S. Navy to bring together and consolidate over 100 of these disparate services — some were BMC Software, some were other companies — into a single managed instance running in AWS,” Blevins said during Federal News Network’s Industry Exchange Cloud 2024. “So now there aren’t 100 places that folks need to go where data is and processes are. There is one single location. There is a software as a service solution that the Navy does not have to manage, but yet they’re able to run their entire operations from that single location.”

Improving mission delivery in multicloud environments

The IT infrastructure isn’t the goal in and of itself, she noted. It’s a means to an end: improving mission delivery. Agencies need to accomplish their missions as efficiently and effectively as possible, from both performance and cost perspectives.

That’s an increasingly complex task when missions are global, rely on many disparate systems and are supported by vast workforces, like those of the Navy and other federal agencies.

That’s where digital employee experience comes into play, Blevins said. Discussions tend to revolve around how IT professionals and cloud architects can work differently, she said, but with a focus on mission delivery, those discussions should include how everyone in an agency can work differently to enhance the mission.

That often means not having to change tools or processes to accomplish whatever mission they’re trying to achieve, Blevins said.

“That digital experience that the sailors have — to be able to not have to worry about the software they’re interacting with, the parts that they’re requesting for their ship or anything else, that they’re able to get in and get out and then continue on with their day and continue on with the mission — is very, very important,” she said.

Optimizing costs during cloud expansion

Often Blevins finds that agencies expect that when they expand more services in the cloud, they will consume more services than they already are. Costs for various cloud services can mount quickly, and not necessarily from the cloud environments themselves. Some agencies and forward-thinking technologists have been experimenting with cloud for well over a decade, much longer than agencies have had guidelines or guardrails in place for these kinds of services, she noted.

That means those services that predate the regulations might be more wasteful in their spending or how they’re architected and might not be as secure as more recent public cloud deployments that meet security, compliance and regulatory requirements, Blevins said.

Even if they’re not needed anymore, those services can still expand the attack surface of an agency’s enterprise if they haven’t been pruned. That’s why Blevins always recommends agencies that started their cloud journeys a decade or more ago take a pause and reevaluate their needs, their existing architecture and their spend on these services.

“What I like to ask organizations, whether it’s an agency or an enterprise, is: What is your most mission critical workload? Where do you invest your resources, your money, your folks?” she said.

“Then look at your IT spend itself. How much are you spending on prem? Is that where those applications are? Is that where those data analysis tools are? How much are you spending in public cloud? A lot of times when that work is done, these agencies and organizations are identifying they’re spending a lot more money and time on environments that are not mission critical to what they’re trying to achieve.”

Blevins said that’s one beneficial aspect of BMC’s partnership with Amazon Web Services: BMC’s SaaS solutions can be transacted through AWS. That means if an agency has a committed spend with AWS that it needs to meet, it can devote some of that spend to multicloud management services.

“It’s really about identifying where your money goes and if it’s going to the right place. Then determining what you might need to pause and go back and work on — instead of maybe what your project plans indicate that you should be doing over the next few months.”

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