Cloud

Building Momentum for Cloud Transitions

The FCC migrated a cumbersome application to the cloud and that success let the agency to move its entire data center over.

Heather B. Hayes

Heather B. Hayes has been covering technology, business and education topics for more than 20 years and has written more than 2,000 published articles. She lives in Virginia.

When David A. Bray became CIO at the Federal Communications Commission in 2013, the agency was saddled with cumbersome legacy systems that consumed more than 85 percent of the IT budget.

The cloud offered an effective and cost-efficient solution. A series of projects helped Bray and his team prove that it could be successful.

First, they moved employees to virtual desktops. They then tackled the most frustrating application: The Consumer Help Center was more than 15 years old and required users to download 1 of 18 different forms, fill it out by hand and mail or fax it back.

Transitioning the application to an on-premises cloud or another federal agency site would have cost more than $3 million and taken 14 to 16 months. However, a Software as a Service model would only cost $450,000, including contractor time, and the new solution would be running in less than six months.

“In fact, we had a workable product in less than 60 days, and it was able to work for all stakeholders, both internally and externally, within another four months,” says Bray.

This success gave them the confidence to move their entire data center to a commercial cloud site all at once. This big step would cut their system expenses nearly in half, freeing up the IT budget for new applications and modernization.

For more on how the FCC moved to the cloud, check out "Feds Tap the Cloud to do the Heavy Lifting in Legacy IT Modernization."