The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency oversees more than 1,000 national banks and federal savings associations. To ensure those banks operate safely, OCC needs to ensure the right data gets to the right employees at the right time. Kristen Baldwin, OCC’s chief information officer and chief data officer, said cloud migration serves as the foundation for its IT modernization goals.

“Everything we do in technology is to support the goal of our mission, to help enable that mission of the OCC,” Baldwin said.

Baldwin said OCC has been an “early adopter” of software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service solutions, and that the agency sees cloud technology as an “enabler for mission delivery.”

“We are deeply committed to an IT modernization strategy, and cloud will be a huge part of that. It truly is a critical enabler to transforming our IT environment,” she said. “We’re setting the stage for a much more agile, scalable and efficient cloud environment that can adapt to the evolving needs that we have and the available options that are out there and the requirements that are specific to our organization.”

Keeping pace with mission with cloud

Tim Silk, the director of solutions engineering for U.S. public sector at HashiCorp, said the cloud is allowing agencies’ IT environments to keep pace with mission delivery.

“I’m able to deploy what I need, and use it to operate my mission. And then, I can tear it down when I don’t need it. So you have this much more ephemeral environment, where new technologies and new workflows are now defining what and how we can actually deliver those services more effectively, efficiently, rapidly and, of course, securely,” Silk said.

OCC’s data users include its workforce, its regulatory partners — including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the Federal Reserve and the banks that it oversees.

Baldwin said her office is taking steps to ensure internal and external data users have “seamless” access to OCC data.

“The business owners, the folks that are using this data every day for mission, are helping us architect that data sharing, which is phenomenal because they’re so invested in it,” she said. “We want to make sure that we have this information available to them when they need it, not to request access, but to make sure that we know, because of their role, they’ll need to have that access.”

Among its advantages, Baldwin said OCC’s cloud environment allows the agency to scale up its capacity when necessary.

“Generally, what we’re trying to do is take a holistic approach to modernization. Of all those mission-critical applications that help power the business that OCC does every single day, our top priority has to be to make sure that technology is working as efficiently as possible. We never want to be the reason that we’re not able to execute that mission efficiently,” Baldwin said.

Cybersecurity for cloud environment

To keep its cloud environment safe from threats, OCC works with third-party experts to shore up its cybersecurity.

“I think this is a huge part of the OCC culture, which was great to find, because we just want to constantly make sure that we are leveraging the most modern and current intelligence related to cybersecurity and testing our environments against that. We use these third-party experts to assess security posture at a regular cadence, and we work to identify any areas that we could either continue to evolve or use to strengthen our environment. In some ways, I think it’s a huge advantage for our staff to be involved in understanding emerging technology and identifying those latest and greatest capabilities and techniques, but also third parties bringing that information as well.”

OCC, like the rest of the federal government, is adopting a zero-trust approach to cybersecurity.

The agency recently completed an independent assessment of its zero-trust adoption maturity.

“Just like every other agency, we have a journey ahead of us to get all the way there, but we’re certainly not starting from scratch on this,” Baldwin said. “There’s a lot of really good work that’s laying a foundation there.”

Baldwin said OCC has implemented identity management roles, and is working on enhanced network segmentation in the next phase of its zero-trust journey.

“Looking ahead, I think using that as our foundation, we’ll focus a bit more on refining our cloud security posture monitoring capabilities, and we’ll keep evolving that network segmentation execution,” Baldwin said.

As OCC achieves its IT modernization goals, Baldwin said cloud-centric data management services will allow the agency to share data sets directly with its partners.

“This capability would mean that we could access large data sets in hours, rather than waiting, in some cases, days to ingest our own copies,” she said. “The ability to be able to share these types of data sets seamlessly with our partner financial regulatory agencies is something we think is right around the corner, and it would really enhance our collaborative effort and improve that efficiency that we’ve been talking about for our OCC workforce.”

Automating workflows

While OCC is using the cloud to advance its mission, Baldwin said the agency still has some on-prem data sets.

“The good news is, we really haven’t come across applications here at OCC that we feel like they need to remain on-prem, due to some kind of specific functionality requirement. Instead, it’s really the how and the when, to get more things over and leveraging the cloud,” she said.

OCC is also looking at emerging technologies. Baldwin said the agency is already using machine learning and robotic process automation to improve efficiency at OCC.

“We’ve really embraced technology as a replacement for repeatable tasks,” she said.

OCC, she added, tests these emerging tools in its solutions lab before scaling them enterprise-wide.

“It’s really a protected space for the solutions lab folks to rapidly test new technologies and ensure they’re compatible and safe — that we can operate them in a secure way,” Baldwin said. “But the goal is to deploy them to production. That is really where we’re connected to the mission so far, being able to integrate these emerging technologies into maybe more static functions.”

Silk said the cloud will also enable agencies to successfully adopt automation solutions.

“When you turn on automation, then that really expands the ability to scale and the speed at which you can deliver services,” he said.

Key topics include:

• Factors influencing cloud adoption decisions from an enterprise perspective
• Key challenges affecting successful cloud adoption
• The progress and challenges federal agencies face in adopting zero trust solutions
• How cloud adoption is accelerating agency missions
• Key industry changes in the cloud landscape
• Support agencies need to integrate cloud with physical enterprise data centers and sensitive workloads