2021 will be the year of cloud agility, according to Pat Mungovan, Senior Vice President, Oracle Public Sector. Mungovan gave us a sneak peek at the upcoming Oracle One Federal event and insights on cloud trends for government agencies in a recent interview with Government Technology Insider.
“This year, One Federal will look a bit different than years’ past. Instead of being an in-person one-day meeting, the 2021 event will be a five-part series over five months,” he said.
Mungovan indicates the new format has numerous benefits, including being able to address a variety of real-world challenges facing federal agencies as they arise over the first half of the new year. The monthly sessions will also feature cloud experts and advocates from the private and public sector, including Oracle CEO Safra Catz, agency leaders from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Army Corps of Engineers, and other Oracle leadership.
“With this model, there is an opportunity to deliver more agile and dynamic information to our audience,” he said. “We’ll be covering topics that our customers have identified as their biggest pain points like infrastructure, analytics, security, and fit-for-purpose SaaS in addition to discussing how agencies can secure highly performant, budget-friendly cloud services.”
With some important shifts coming for agencies looking to move to the cloud this year, Mungovan emphasized the importance of agency leaders remaining up to date. “There is going to be a stark focus on their priorities and making sure these services align to the mission. I think a fit-for-purpose cloud will take center stage.”
To achieve this fit-for-purpose cloud, agencies should look to cloud partners that offer an array of dynamic solutions. “This year, the industry is focused on enterprise workloads and as you look at the federal space, the workloads that got moved to cloud are nonessential — like email — but right now, we offer a full suite of service from SaaS to PaaS, so we have all the workloads for any move to the cloud. “Hybrid, cloud, dev test, production – we truly will be quadrupling down with providing on-premises, hybrid cloud and more,” Mungovan notes.
These capabilities are important for agencies today and will help them better adapt to an unknown future. Mungovan said that one of the key conversations this year will be to understand how cloud solutions streamlined agency operations during the first year of the COVID pandemic and how these experiences will shape a journey to the cloud.
“You need a partner in the mission, and it needs to be someone you trust, whether in security or performance. The response to the Covid environment isn’t just a federal response –it’s state and local, it’s healthcare and education, it’s a national response, and it’s a global response. We’ve been a partner in the mission for decades, and as we move into this new phase we do so with excitement and with a focus on making all the necessary investments,” Mungovan said.
To hear more from Mungovan as well as from federal CIOs who have made the cloud journey register for Oracle One Federal.