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

Choice and self-determination are cornerstones of our nation’s democratic process. Come election night, we might not all root for the same candidates, but there’s one point we can all rally around – the need for modernization and the role of the cloud in powering U.S. elections.

The Obama and Trump administrations may not have a lot in common. But encouraging federal agencies to move their computing workloads to cloud services providers has been a definite point of policy continuity.

Recall that during the Obama years, cloud and a fresh data center consolidation initiative roughly coincided. (I say “fresh” because of presidential findings that the government has too many computers dated at least to the Reagan administration).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming. Contrary to the stuff of science fiction, however, AI has the potential to have a positive impact within the federal IT community. The adoption of AI will likely be the result of the adoption of hybrid and cloud IT computing.

Government agencies are moving to the cloud. It’s been a recurring message for a number of years, but in 2018 new statistics from Gartner give us concrete data on cloud spend: local governments spend 20.6% of their IT budget on cloud, while national governments spend 22%.

Federal government agencies as well as states and cities are rich repositories of data – data on everything from health to public safety, education to the environment. But those same organizations have moved beyond being isolated data storehouses. Data is no longer locked away on devices and storage drives, hidden behind firewalls. Instead, it’s becoming distributed (cloud and on-premises), dynamic (the velocity of data from sensors, citizen attributes, etc. is constantly fluctuating) and diverse (structured, unstructured, and streaming).

Another day, another government ransomware victim. On March 22^nd, 2018, the city of Atlanta found itself locked out of computers across government offices and facing a ransom demand of $51,000 or $6,800 per computer, GCN reported.

IoT Demo: Here

Blog Part 1: Setting the Stage

Blog Part 2: Architecting the Scene

Ah, the good old days, when things were simple. When there were a known number of devices on any government network, and the federal IT pro had a complete understanding of how to secure those devices.

Just about every type of existing application is currently being migrated or considered for migration to a cloud infrastructure. While priorities vary from agency to agency based on mission priorities and/or application development and re-platform priorities – the pattern is clear. And, with the passing of the Modernizing Government Technology Act (MGLA) into law in December 2017, the funds to spur agency migration to the cloud are there.