Cloud Hosting

In 2022, federal agencies are estimated to spend $7.8 billion on cloud computing. While this spending on cloud computing is necessary, its imperative that the government uses its allotted funding appropriately to leverage the clouds full potential and avoid common pitfalls.

Ive frequently witnessed government agencies get locked into a cloud reseller that doesnt give them the full capabilities offered by AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure. Most people outside of the federal market dont realize that the government does not buy cloud directly from the cloud providersapart from some very large contracts like the upcoming JEDI replacement contract vehicle, JWCC. They buy through a network of reseller partners that offer volume discounts and try to bundle managed services to help with cloud management.

This approach gives the reseller, not the customer, the power to hold the keys to their kingdomand can make it difficult for the customer to easily switch between cloud providers in the event of poor performance, lack of access or billing transparency. The federal government would benefit from keeping a small, but purposeful, cloud project management office (PMO) in-house. Thus ensuring that root access is available to all the accounts, subscriptions and projects to provide freedom to the agency to more easily change partners as their cloud maturity evolves.

Ive also seen government customers unfocused on the holistic end-user experience of actually using the cloud. The result is fragmented collections of different systems, processes and steps that cause engineers to be frustrated and inefficient. Customers must transform the end-to-end cloud provisioning process so that selfservice is paramount and existing technology investments are seamlessly and transparently integrated to the end-user. When done correctly, innovation will be the byproduct, because focus can go towards developing the next generation of mission systems and toolsrather than trying to determine how to get a cloud account to begin a project.

Challenges exist, but there are proven steps the government can take to get the most value from their cloud infrastructure.

More here:
Enabling Cloud Adoption in the Government - DevOps.com