A day after releasing the federal government’s final Cloud Smart strategy in June 2019, Federal Deputy Chief Information Officer Margie Graves shared several observations about the state of cloud adoption and where agencies are heading.
“We know that most agencies will continue to operate in what I would consider to be a hybrid environment,” Graves told an audience of government and industry professionals during the Advanced Technology Academic Research Center (ATARC) Cloud and Infrastructure Summit in Washington, D.C. “So being able to seamlessly move between those environments requires that you understand the engineering that goes on between … clouds.”
The hybrid cloud state Graves described is really multiple types of clouds (i.e., public, private, community) working together. And although a number of agencies are operating email, collaboration and even some mission-critical systems in the cloud, many are not. The reason? They often don’t know where to begin or are apprehensive about the cloud, data security, access to data and more.
Hybrid cloud allows agencies to move to the cloud without abandoning the convenience of their preferred on-premise solutions. GovLoop partnered with NetApp to produce this report and highlight how hybrid cloud environments help agencies improve IT operations and data management. In the following pages, we explain the current challenges agencies face with cloud adoption and how hybrid cloud can help make that transition a smooth one.
