Federal News Network and Oracle asked a panel of federal cloud expert practitioners for their views on cloud migration strategies.
Just because commercial cloud computing has been a part of the federal IT landscape for more than a decade, choosing and moving workloads to clouds are still far from cut-and-dried processes.
For one thing, the major commercial cloud providers are all reliable, but they aren’t interchangeable. Their schedules of services differ widely. That means agencies need to do careful planning to ensure a good match between the workload requirements and the services a cloud services provider offers.
For another, cloud approaches each have different financial implications. For example, large data flows might be inexpensive in the upload direction, but costly in the download direction. That can effect applications chosen for cloud hosting and the way agency tech staffs architect the applications.
Federal News Network and Oracle asked a panel of federal cloud expert practitioners for their views on cloud migration strategies.
Among the factors IT officials need to think about, panelists agreed, is the degree to which the cloud will support contemporary application development in the agile mode. And, how the architecture of the resulting application and its runtime version might perform in the cloud, taking into account the potential for latency.
Panelists also noted that in the internet-of-things era, when the “things” are gaining increasing computing power, system designs that rely on cloud computing must also take into account the need to take advantage of edge computing. Local processing can reduce costly data flows. It can also accommodate continuity of operations in austere environments such as faced by the military or emergency responders, when network bandwidth might be limited.
For details on these and many other insights, watch the videos.
It’s always a good time to move to the cloud, and it’s never a good time to move to the cloud. You just have to pick a workload that makes sense – something that makes sense…There are a lot of opportunities out there, there are a lot of software-as-a-service offerings out there now, which makes it easier to get your toes dipped into the pool.
Deputy Director, Governance and Enterprise Management Services Division, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
From an application development perspective, [cloud] is where you’re really starting to see the agility come in and the cloud services areas, blockchain services, artificial intelligence and machine learning services – all with their application programming interfaces people can take advantage of.
Group Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Public Sector, Oracle
Where…cloud.gov fits into the broader ecosystem: There are a lot of different necessarily tools and services you can use. But you’re not locked in. You are open to connect to a range of different services from a range of different providers. That kind of flexibility and modularity … is really, really important.
Director, Cloud.gov, General Services Administration
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