Federal agencies are no longer adopting cloud computing simply because of cloud-first policies or the need to reduce data centers.
Federal agencies are no longer adopting cloud computing simply because of cloud-first policies or the need to reduce data centers. Flexibility in application development and deployment, a better place to innovate in digital services, and enhanced cybersecurity rank among the most common reasons.
That’s according to a panel of Unisys and Amazon Web Services experts assembled for this information-filled video. They discuss the stakeholders who must be involved in agency cloud decisions as well as some of the common challenges to cloud adoptions. The latter range from setting a sound acquisition strategy to ensuring the IT staff is on board with both the skills and mindset to reap cloud advantages.
Of particular note is the question of vendor “lock-in.” Panelists agreed that while agencies need to regain the privilege and ability to move workloads from one vendor to another, they should also enter into cloud agreements with an eye towards stability and long-term relationships, choosing cloud vendors with the service catalog necessary to sustain the agency’s requirements.
With a trusted broker service abstracting the interface between government and cloud provider, government can gain the simplicity of unified operational and financial views.
You’re seeing agencies start to realize the flexibility that this on-demand compute allows. You’ll also see the commercial cloud providers – AWS included – are delivering a lot of innovation around services [such as] serverless computing and security through APIs.
Vice President, U.S. Government, Amazon Web Services
There are immense opportunities to serve the stakeholders of government more effectively with cloud. But we see there’s a lot of things that need to happen… Often time agencies need to rethink their procurement or acquisition approach. How do I set a contract so that I can deal with the amount of innovation, the sheer number of service catalog items that you have.
Vice President of Application Services, Unisys Federal
One of the things Unisys CloudForte brings from an operational perspective is integration into your service desk, so that you can have automated tickets right from the end user up to the cloud provider. More important, what we do provide is a view into your financials. We provide conversion between the consumption records [and the] contract line items so that the government can easily understand what they’ve consumed.
CTO, Homeland & Critical Infrastructure, Unisys Federal
Listen to the full show:
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