Having a sound cloud strategy for your agency means having a holistic strategy, especially for your agency’s data. That’s according to Rob Carey, the president of Cloudera Government Solutions and a former federal IT practitioner himself. He said the essential question for cloud still remains – how to take data and enable the migration from the legacy compute and storage platforms to the cloud.

It requires mastery of the data, including its format, taxonomy and structure, before you move it. Carey noted that during his work in the Navy, the cloud focus was on application rationalization, paring down roster of applications before making the migration. What that exercise uncovered, he said, was a data problem of duplication, difficulty in identifying the authoritative data sets, and the variety of formats.

During his conversation with Tom Temin, as part of Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange, Carey recommended a sequential, checklist approach to understand the scope of your data, how applications interact with it, and what data you can leave behind. This should be done, he added, working with the various potential commercial cloud providers so you understand the implications of each cloud’s services and costs.

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