From the Cloud First initiative in 2010 to today’s Cloud Smart strategy, the federal government has been on a decade-long cloud-journey that aims to transform IT and better deliver on the mission.
While the Cloud First initiative did not provide specific guidance how to accomplish cloud adoption, Cloud Smart offers detailed insights surrounding security, procurement, and necessary workforce skills to foster cloud adoption and implementation.
In 2018, former Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent stated that this evolution reflects how agencies have a better hands-on understanding of the cloud, and that industry capabilities have advanced since the launch of Cloud First a decade ago.
A core part of meeting this policy directive is effectively migrating traditional databases to the cloud for optimizing efficiency, and delivering superior mission-critical performance and core-to-edge security.
Dave Pipes, Solution Architect at Affigent; and Amit Bahadur, President & Chief Operating Officer at Tharseo IT, recently provided a deep-dive into this topic in the latest Government Technology Insider podcast interview.
“As far as IT transformation goes, moving to the cloud generally requires a more modern and efficient organizational structure,” said Pipes. “Agile development, breaking down IT management organization silos, speeding time to implementation for new capabilities, and increasing purchasing speed and responsiveness are all organizational cloud requirements that will make IT more responsive to the mission. Moving to the cloud also enables overall IT transformation.”
In addition, there are tremendous benefits and advantages to migrating databases to the cloud. “What we are seeing is the management of massive amounts of data growth in the new digital economy, which is a huge challenge for organizations,” said Bahadur. “This is where the advantage of the Oracle Cloud comes in, where customers have instant access to optimized databases, and access to all Oracle database innovations.”
From a security perspective, moving the cloud can help reduce risks – especially when approached correctly. “The use of FedRAMP and DoD IL-certified systems and datacenters can increase security for many organizations, but it depends on their security posture before the workloads are consolidated in the cloud,” added Pipes.
In terms of successful database migrations, Tharseo IT has helped many government customers to effectively assess, design, and implement the move to the cloud, for optimal results. “Our multi-step migration has allowed organizations to achieve increases in system performance for a much better price,” added Bahadur. “This also allowed database-related rules to focus on actually using the data, which has enabled them to make better decisions in real-time.”
Listen to the full conversation with Dave Pipes and Amit Bahadur about how federal agencies can effectively migrate databases to the cloud for enhanced security and mission performance.
