Page 6 - CARAHSOFT, January/February 2020

Elevating Government Services with Cloud
Reducing time to value with
cloud applications
Leveraging digital best practices can help government agencies offer more responsive service
Rob Stein
Senior Vice President, North America Public Sector, Salesforce
life cycle on Salesforce. Academies are replacing binders full of paper applications with a digital profile that makes it easy
to compare and contrast candidates at
the pace of shifting admissions priorities. Several areas of DOD use this same
agile, 360-degree approach to manage individual missions, creating a historical and holistic view of POW/MIA recovery efforts, exchange service logistics, and more that can be adapted and updated as new information dictates.
Success at civilian, state and local agencies
Federal civilian agencies have seen
similar success, evident in Farmers.gov,
a cloud application from the Agriculture Department that enables farmers to submit grant applications, access loan information, find service center locations and more. State
CLOUD TECHNOLOGY IS
fundamentally changing the way
government agencies perform their missions, build thriving communities and protect the well-being of the people they serve.
Cloud’s “clicks, not code” time-to- market — compared to more traditional data-center build-outs, coding and software testing timelines — helps agencies take a requirement from idea to application at
an unprecedented rate. Cloud can co-exist with legacy infrastructure to unlock data that resides in back-office systems, deliver it across the enterprise and provide the agility needed to make it highly applicable to just about any mission need.
This gives agencies a way to transition existing legacy IT while leapfrogging the innovation process again and again on project number 2, number 3, number 4 and
so on. All without sacrificing security and compliance.
DOD’s use of SaaS and PaaS
Our military is using cloud-based software as a service and platform as a service to manage a number of processes foundational to the success of the Defense Department as a whole. For example, in the area of recruiting, military academies are at a crossroads. The Information Age has shifted hobbies, interests and pastimes of today’s teens and young adults, impacting everything from entry requirements to recruiting tactics. At the same time, warfare continues to change around new threats such as cyber, prompting DOD to develop new skill sets as the service member moves from cadet to veteran.
Several institutions are responding to these changes by managing the career
davooda/Shutterstock/FCW Staff
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