White Paper Automation & Orchestration Government
Last updated on April 18th, 2023 at 4:31pm
Managing Cost and Ensuring Compliance
Paving the Way to the Cloud
Forecasting a potential 30% reduction in data infrastructure spend, the U.S. Government embarked on a “cloud-first” policy beginning with the 2012 budget cycle. When evaluating new IT deployments, agencies were directed to default to cloud-based solutions in lieu of building additional in-house capabilities provided secure, reliable, and cost-effective options were available. The cloud promised less duplication of systems, more easily managed environments, and shorter procurement cycles. The overall goal was to deliver greater impact from IT spend to citizens.
The need to enable efficient and scalable technology development, deliver stellar customer experience to employees and the public, and reap economic efficiencies has helped pave the way for increased cloud consumption. In addition, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) has aided adoption by standardizing security services and streamlining the assessment process.
Six years after the cloud-first mandate, cloud use is steadily increasing across the government. In the intelligence community (IC) alone, cloud use has increased more than 200% year over year1. An ever-growing number of missions are now being executed with greater agility, cost savings, and speed because the government is taking advantage of commercial cloud services.
Challenges on the Road to Cloud Value
Cloud adoption has largely come from the bottom up, with small groups of early adopters migrating project workloads to the cloud and seeing initial success. These groups help transform organizational thinking and challenge the status quo. Seeing success, additional teams begin to express interest.
What happens next is somewhat predictable: agencies end up with numerous systems engineered for the cloud but still reliant on manual IT cloud governance to control access, budget, and compliance.
