Tactics for your agency’s move to the cloud

Federal Drive

Tactics for your agency’s move to the cloud

HP introduces Government Cloud Consulting Services to help government agencies comply with OMB\'s \"cloud-first\" policy. We get details from HP\'s Jeff Bergeron...

Federal News Network Staff

February 3, 2011 9:31 am

2 min read

By Suzanne Kubota
Senior Internet Editor
FederalNewsRadio.com

Federal CIOs are under White House orders to move to the cloud.

The challenge now is for agencies to figure out how much can be moved and how fast while staying on budget and not risking security.

Hewlett Packard has launched a new consulting service to help.

Jeff Bergeron, the U.S. Public Sector Chief Technology Officer for HP, told Federal News Radio the service is centered around a series of workshops to build approaches to “transform and migrate into the cloud.”

Our fundamental philosophy is that it’s not certainly a Big Bang approach and it needs to be planned accordingly as agencies look to begin to consume cloud services in the forms of e-mail or infrastructure services, or even software services as well.

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to get to the cloud, said Bergeron. “There certainly is some standards associated with the transformation,” but needs to be tailored to particular agencies “on how that adoption will take place.”

There also shouldn’t be a rush, said Bergeron. “You can move rather rapidly in some cases to speed adoption, but we like to take a more methodical approach to defining that transformation to minimize risk.”

And just because you can move to the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean you should. That, cautioned Bergeron, is why the workshops are “important to understand what services can be moved into the cloud and which ones cannot.” Not all systems and not all applications are prepared to move.

Once that happens though, your agency can become even more mobile, and more able to meet yet another order from the White House: this one regarding telework.

“Being able to source applications on demand,” said Bergeron, “in a mobile environment is certainly critical, so we’ll see the explosion of mobile and mobile workforce and mobile devices within the public sector market as cloud becomes more of a reality.”