Cloud

Federal IT Is Getting Comfortable with the Cloud

While federal IT leaders and workers are becoming more comfortable with migrating to the cloud, they still need help vetting which cloud service providers are the best fit for their agencies.

Ryan Petersen

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Ryan Petersen has worked in publishing for more than two decades, most of it spent creating award-winning content and strategy for CDW’s family of tech magazine brands. As editor-in-chief, he works with his team to develop compelling and useful industry-focused stories to share with the technology world. Outside of work, Ryan enjoys spending time with his children, traveling, online gaming, and following Iowa Hawkeye sports and Cubs baseball.

A new report reveals encouraging news about how U.S. agencies are increasingly comfortable with cloud computing.

The MeriTalk survey, “Migration Motivation: The Shift in Federal Cloud Optimism,” finds that 85 percent of federal IT decision-makers are more optimistic today about what cloud can do for their agencies than five years ago. The most prevalent drivers include cost savings, increased flexibility and end of life for legacy systems.

What’s more, employees are comfortable with cloud migrations too. According to the survey of 150 federal IT managers, 75 percent say their workforce is somewhat comfortable or very comfortable moving their systems to the cloud.

Nearly half of respondents reveal that these migrations are going better than expected and are achieving agency goals. All federal IT managers can smooth their deployments by heeding the lessons learned by the early adopters.

Helping Fence Sitters and Box Huggers Make the Switch

Despite the many cloud computing successes found by agencies that we’ve covered in FedTech, federal workers by nature take a conservative approach to the technology. More than half of respondents describe themselves as “fence sitters” — that is, those who are slowly but surely moving systems that present fewer security and privacy concerns, less reliability and less operational risk.

Another 19 percent identify as “box huggers” who are migrating systems to the cloud only because of cloud-first mandates and legacy systems reaching end of life. These IT leaders need to get on board to join the optimists who are excited about the future of the technology within their agencies.

One smart strategy to accelerate adoption is to pick the right partner. The MeriTalk report points out that IT decision-makers seek cloud service providers that can offer guaranteed security, performance and reliability; on-call tech support; and proven experience in federal government.

Seeking these qualities and thoroughly vetting cloud providers can help agencies capitalize on the strength of partnerships and speed deployment throughout their organizations.

Roman Rybaleov/Thinkstock