Is your state or local agency ready for the cloud? Whether you’re thinking of moving to a SaaS email system or migrating data to cloud storage and processing platforms, a cloud readiness assessment might be in order.

Before you make the move to the cloud, risks need to be assessed and technical readiness must be considered. In-house expertise must be aligned and security concerns overcome. Then there’s the matter of data governance. Not forgetting your procurement team who must familiarize themselves with cloud models, contracts, and billing.

Insider threats and the misuse of data stored in the cloud has long been a concern for agency and IT leaders. But what remains clear, according to a new survey by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), is that there is clear lack of procedure for dealing with these instances in cloud computing.

Jetlag is a mind killer.

Anyone who has ever had to regularly brave the US Airport Circus to make sure the checks don’t bounce at the end of the month, understands that jetlag isn’t something that only hits you the day after you travel. The confused, fuzzy-headed filter will occasionally slam down on your poor hapless brain anywhere from 24 to 168 hours after landing back in your home time zone.

Content Delivery Networks (“CDNs”) do a good job of keeping themselves clean and up-to-date. However, sometimes the origin systems/applications/webpages we are using go through a big update and/or we’d like to have a hard cut-over to a new edition or version of our sites. Having the old versions of the files hanging around in the CDN could cause delays in the roll out, or strange behaviors in our web application.

We are going to take a simple but often misunderstood AWS methodology / feature and drag it out into the unapologetic sunlight via my way of looking at things. I tend to deal with IT professionals from all spectrums of the scale, so in the finest tradition of compromise, we are going to soar between 30,000 and 500 feet on this one.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a very large sprawling platform. As such, it has a very large collection of API’s to issue commands against. The AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) team has done a great job in the last few years of standardizing the commands – both in syntax and function.

Transitioning to the cloud? Chances are, when you make the transition, you’ll take baby steps – assessing your workloads in totality and individually, determining the most efficient platform, preparing thoroughly and then migrating just that workload, then the next, and so on. It’s standard procedure and is the best way to proceed with minimal risk.

What you’ve done here is create a hybrid environment. Most of your IT is still on-premise, but certain workloads are in the cloud. And it’s likely to stay that way.

Cloud computing is no doubt on the mind of IT teams at every college and university. But moving to the cloud isn’t just an IT decision. The unique culture within Higher Ed impacts how cloud buying decisions are made. For example, students inhabit a multi-platform world and expect interoperability across devices and desktops. Funding and procurement is another consideration.

When a longtime customer was looking to modernize its legacy Human Capital Management (HCM) system, they turned to DLT Solutions, US Communities and Oracle to make the procurement fast and easy.

Check out this video of the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities’ Director of IT, Paul Pauesick, discussing how he and the agency are, “looking to save around $1.8M in the next five years,” by moving to the cloud.

For many federal agencies, the decision to deploy public or private clouds has come down to this: they’re going with both. They’re embracing hybrid clouds.

It’s really no surprise given that federal IT is balancing the need for greater agility, flexibility, and innovation, with strict security control. Hybrid clouds provide the perfect alternative, because they allow agencies to become more nimble and efficient while still maintaining control.