It has been 10 years since the U.S. government began warming to cloud computing, beginning with the federal Cloud First initiative in 2010 leading to today’s Cloud Smart strategy – a game plan for bringing processes and applications into a new hardware environment.

But to take advantage full advantage of a cloud-driven ecosystem, the government must have more than just a cloud strategy. Agencies also need a data strategy.

What is a cloud data strategy?

It’s often said that there are two types of organizations: those that have been hacked, and those that will be – turning the conversations around security breaches from ‘what if?’ to ‘when?’.

Key takeaways show how public sector customers are achieving more with cloud.

As cloud continues to transform the public sector, cloud has had its own metamorphosis: from a trendy buzz word to a catalyst for meaningful change, innovation, and more. Last month, AWS hosted its 10^th annual AWS Public Sector Summit. The conference brought together more than 17,000 attendees for 2+ days of insights, sessions, and networking, and explored how cloud is fueling the public sector for a limitless future.

Recap

The AWS Public Sector Summit is just around the corner. Part of a global series of summits, this year’s event in Washington, D.C. brings the public sector cloud community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. DLT will be exhibiting at the Summit this year with its technology vendors including AWS, Crowdstrike, NetApp, Quest, and more in booth #800.

Federal agencies are using multiple public clouds in addition to on-premises private and non-cloud infrastructures. This mutli-cloud adoption is creating increasingly complex environments and making it difficult to manage and protect data. Without proper data management, hybrid and multi-cloud environments can quickly become just another series of expensive and risky silos. All cloud migration strategies should encompass data management best practices to maximize cloud adoption benefits while minimizing risk.

For the last few weeks, the federal IT industry has been trying to decipher the 18-page “DOD Cloud Strategy”. It is dated December 2018 but was posted online this month.

Among the initial reactions:

Article by Brandon Shopp, Vice President, Product Strategy, SolarWinds

A recent report regarding the modernization of Federal Information Technology (IT), coordinated by the American Technology Council (ATC) last year, called for agencies to “identify solutions to current barriers regarding agency cloud adoption.”

2019 will be the year of the hybrid cloud, claim federal executives. As offices like FedRAMP, OMB, and GSA continue to promote cloud computing as the path to IT modernization, hybrid cloud can help alleviate the regulatory compliance and security requirements that agencies must adhere to. With a hybrid strategy, agencies can maintain legacy applications and an on-premise infrastructure, while leveraging the public cloud for extra storage or compute power as needed, or when they need to introduce new services.

Cloud services are accelerating agility and collaboration and generating cost-efficiencies for government agencies. But as the public sector takes more and more advantage of the cloud, it’s important not to forget the data. In SaaS environments, agencies own the security of that data and need to access it appropriately. When using IaaS or PaaS, government is also responsible for the security of those workloads and the correct configuration of the underlying application and infrastructure components.

The service-to-the-citizen movement is adding oomph to federal agencies’ adoption of cloud computing. And vice versa.