With any change in administration comes new priorities and initiatives.
Sometimes those initiatives are a complete overhaul of what took place under the previous administration. Other times the focus is on enhancing the work that’s already in place. For the federal government, investments in cloud computing fall into the latter category.
In May 2017, President Donald Trump issued a cybersecurity executive order that, among other things, requires agencies to “show preference in their procurement for shared IT services, to the extent permitted by law, including email, cloud, and cybersecurity services.”
Cloud adoption is sure to receive ongoing attention as both congressional lawmakers and the White House work to move agencies off legacy technology to more modern IT. “Modernization, in this sense, is not simply replacing individual outdated IT systems with newer ones; rather, it is a holistic approach to federal IT that fundamentally transforms how agencies accomplish their missions,” according to the president’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal.
But, with any new business model comes challenges. The urgency to move to cloud resulted in rushed planning cycles and decisions. Early thinking that one cloud deployment could do all that was required has given way to a multi-cloud scenario. Agencies are now beginning to wrestle with the more complicated, but required, challenge of managing multiple clouds. They must balance the need to have the right cloud for the right use case while also ensuring they can properly manage those clouds. In many situations, agencies look for help from cloud service providers.
This new pocket guide will give you an overview of the current landscape of multiple clouds in government, explain how we got here and why it’s so crucial, as well as provide a brief overview of the difference between hybrid and multiple clouds. The guide also includes case studies and common challenges and solutions for managing a diverse cloud environment.
