Moving to the Cloud: A Decision Roadmap
Cloud is not the end game. It’s like any other technology: It’s a means to an end, and the end is improvement in mission performance.”
That’s the basic starting point from which agencies should approach cloud computing, says David McClure, associate administrator of citizen services and innovative technologies at the General Services Administration.
“Cloud is not the end game. It’s like any other technology: It’s a means to an end, and the end is improvement in mission performance.”
That’s the basic starting point from which agencies should approach cloud computing, says David McClure, associate administrator of citizen services and innovative technologies at the General Services Administration.
McClure joined a panel of three other federal executives for a FedTech webinar to discuss how agencies can prepare for migration to the cloud. The other officials who participated in the “Getting Ready for the Cloud” panel were: Dawn Leaf of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Ray O’Brien of the NASA Ames Research Center and Henry Sienkiewicz of the Defense Information Systems Agency.
McClure provided what he called a cloud decisional roadmap to help agency IT teams “reach real business-type decisions about whether to move data and services to cloud environments.”
The front-end piece of this process is essentially the same as for any type of service that requires technology, he noted. Agencies need to identify the type of service they need, define a core business case and then outline the cloud service requirements that would need to be met for success.
But don’t assume that cloud will definitely be the right approach, McClure cautioned. In some cases, cloud will not be suited to the intended data or business outcomes, he said.
If a cloud approach is considered viable, there are some items unique to this technology model that agencies will then need to consider, McClure said. “In those cases where an agency has made a decision to move to cloud environments, there is a need to search through the different types of capacity and types of service provisioning that’s provided either in pure public or managed-public cloud services or a government-managed cloud service, which could be across lines of business within multiple agencies, or a private … or government-based cloud service within your own domain.”
Cloud has the potential to let agencies achieve efficiencies, but McClure reiterated that “these kinds of decisions are really critical to being successful in the cloud.”
