Page 18 - FCW, April 2017

CAPITALIZING ON THE CLOUD
BEYOND LIFT AND SHIFT
New solutions and strategies promise to simplify increasingly complex cloud environments.
SPONSORED CONTENT
TIM BOCK
DELL PUBLIC ALLIANCE MANAGER, VIRTUSTREAM
T HERE IS NO DENYING the benefits of operating in a low-cost, highly
effective and highly resilient cloud framework. But the journey is more complex than simply shifting existing
applications to the cloud.
It is tempting to believe an agency can take
whatever it’s already doing and “cloudize” it to achieve all the benefits that we see with Netflix
or Uber. However, the underlying cloud-native architecture that supports the activities of those companies is fundamentally different from the way, say, Microsoft SharePoint or SAP Financials are architected.
And although lifting and shifting an appli- cation to the cloud can save money in the short term, it doesn’t take full advantage of cloud tech- nology. The real gains come from understanding scale and the difference between a cloud-native and a government-procured application.
A company like Netflix designs everything
in a forward-looking DevOps framework in which developers are constantly updating portions of the service platform. The core business of such companies is to deliver those kinds of applications. By contrast, there aren’t many government agencies whose core business is developing applications, so there’s a huge skills gap between what the average agency wants to do and what its existing workforce is trained to do.
In the end, many agencies will not require the kind of scale that necessitates moving to a DevOps model. Instead, each agency should develop a cloud strategy that begins with understanding whether it is a consumer of apps or a provider of apps. Then the agency must determine how much it needs to scale to provide an adequate level of support.
For example, making it possible for citizens to view their Social Security benefits online requires a massive scale compared to a Transportation Department app for pilots, which has a much
smaller target audience than every person in the U.S. with a Social Security number.
Agencies must evaluate each application by asking whether it makes sense to transform it or get out of the business of managing data centers and infrastructure. The right platform, technology or method will vary by agency and application, and many agencies will end up with a hybrid-cloud or even a multiple-cloud approach.
Fortunately, the industry is moving
in the direction of offering a single pane of
glass for managing environments that involve multiple vendors’ products and on-premises implementations. The key is developing open application programming interfaces to tie into those cloud management tools, which means vendors must put the customer’s needs ahead of the desire for proprietary standards.
And as agencies start thinking about moving enterprise-grade applications into the cloud, they must move their enterprise-grade security as well. The goal is to find a partner that will go beyond FedRAMP validation to coordinate the tools, processes and procedures in its data center with the customer’s security paradigm.
Those specifications and evaluations can complicate the contracting process, but picking the right security partner is more important than picking the right hypervisor.
It also means, however, that the procurement process must change. Agencies can make a little exception here and there, but the same procurement regulations apply to the cloud that govern the way the Defense Department, for example, buys weapons systems.
Although FITARA has extended more budget control to CIOs, it will take a high-level push from lawmakers and the White House to give agencies the flexibility they need to truly take advantage of all that the cloud has to offer.
Tim Bock is Dell public alliance manager at Virtustream.
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