The federal government’s shift to a hybrid and multi-cloud environment is in full swing — 91% of federal agencies say they have all, most, or some systems and solutions in the cloud, and over 45% of agencies say they store citizen and mission data in the cloud.

But a common mistake organizations make when moving to the cloud, even up until now, is provisioning cloud resources in the same way they did on-premises by over-allocating resources to ensure availability and scalability. That usually leads to unnecessary costs since cloud infrastructure can scale dynamically based on demand.

“They will allocate a significant amount of resources just to ensure they have availability and scalability,” Chet Hayes, Vertosoft chief technology officer, told Federal News Network.

“I would encourage them to rethink that and think about how to take advantage of the capabilities that the cloud provides so that instead of allocating all that infrastructure up front, allocate only what you need. And there are tools and technologies, some intelligent automation capabilities that can help them manage that going forward in the future so they get the most value in terms of what they’re trying to do in the cloud.”

Initially, some of the most common challenges agencies have faced during their cloud migration journeys are related to the “lift and shift” approach, which often results in much higher costs and inefficiencies since it fails to leverage the full potential of cloud-native features.

Successful cloud adoption, Hayes said, involves re-engineering applications in order to take advantage of those cloud-native capabilities and architect applications with the expectation of failure.

“When I say that, I mean taking full advantage of the resiliency that you would expect to have in cloud infrastructure. Going back to what doesn’t work — lift and shift. For everybody who has taken that approach, one of the biggest challenges they end up seeing is the sticker shock because they are not actually realizing true cost savings. In fact, in many cases, they were seeing higher bills for their infrastructure,” said Hayes.

“Being able to go back and rethink how those applications were architected, how they structured it, how they designed for that resiliency, for that scalability, is a little bit different when you’re taking advantage of that infrastructure.”

The things that do work when it comes to successful cloud adoption are automation, infrastructure as code (IaC), and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.

By implementing CI/CD pipelines and automating its infrastructure, for example, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has been able to  reduce the time required to deploy new applications and updates from months to weeks and sometimes days.

“It could have been even faster, but the challenge they ran into at the time was just their own internal security and evaluation process to determine if this would move to production or not. Once they figured out how to automate a lot of that, they were able to accelerate their ability to get that capability out, and it made a pretty significant difference in their ability to expand and scale,” said Hayes.

Intelligent automation for cost efficiency

Understandably, this over-provisioning or over-allocating cloud resources to ensure scalability and availability gives organizations a “warm, fuzzy” feeling, meaning it provides some peace of mind for the agencies but never cost-efficiency.

Intelligent automation tools, however, can help by right-sizing agencies’ infrastructure. They can automatically analyze usage patterns, adjust resource allocation based on actual demand, and optimize infrastructure to reduce costs.

“They can make a determination that based on whether it’s this time of year or the demand I’m seeing, they can allocate and say, ‘I need to make sure my infrastructure is running on these types of instances to handle that scale and whether that’s high or whether that’s low,’ and they’re actually able to optimize their spend in these environments. Automation and intelligent automation have the smarts to help them do that and do that quickly and effectively,” said Hayes.

Beyond cost management, automation tools can also handle governance and compliance requirements. 

Accelerating technology procurement through the cloud marketplace

Federal agencies are also turning to cloud marketplaces to accelerate the procurement of emerging technologies.

“They’re looking for a more efficient way to acquire this stuff, and so from a Vertosoft perspective, we rolled out our cloud marketplace accelerator that allows and helps us get tools, whether it’s [Software as a service] or server-based types of components, into a cloud marketplace, so that an organization who is working with one of the hyperscalers and has access to their marketplace, can actually buy that software through there,” said Hayes.

“It helps both sides. It helps these emerging technology companies that have very innovative technologies and solutions that the government really wants to buy, and it helps the government in that it’s very much like an easy button for them to procure because the marketplace is structured such that it is generally already on a contract, and it just requires a very simple transaction through their own cloud marketplace infrastructure that they have.”

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