Page 73 - FCW, July/August 2018

CLOUD
As we tackle the enterprise-level concerns,
we want to establish a preferred path that builds on the experiences of the early adopters across the components.
What are the benefits of using optimized cloud resources?
Moving to the cloud can advance the DHS mission in three areas. One is the mission itself. We think there is the opportunity to increase agility and speed, improve our cybersecurity posture and better leverage our data. The second bucket we are looking at is efficiency.
We think there is the opportunity to realize unit cost savings, reduce capital expenditures and shift reinvesting in new capabilities from the legacy investment that’s predominantly in operations and maintenance.
We also see the opportunity to transform as an organization by engaging our workers and helping them develop and move toward the skills of the future, while developing a federated unity of effort and moving to an as-a-service IT service delivery operations model.
Mission, efficiency and transformation are the top-line benefits now. Realizing those benefits requires smart planning, execution and oversight. With our early cloud adopters, some programs are seeing some benefits, but uniformly we’re not seeing the benefits I just talked about. That underscores the need for optimization.
The early adopters are seeing that they’re all at the beginning of a learning curve about how to optimize in an
effective way. A key strategy within our Cloud Steering Group is to leverage the early adopters and help them move up the learning curve so that we’re realizing some of those benefits and then leaving repeatable processes behind so we can scale out their experience across the department.
Is the cloud making it easier to use emerging technology?
We are actively working with our partners in industry on leading technologies that could support enterprisewide migration to a more defense-in-depth security
model and accelerate the migration and optimization of applications to the cloud. The early adopters have, in turn, been working with our partners in industry and sharing knowledge across the government and the private sector. That’s a direct innovation pathway.
The indirect piece is that we’re reducing barriers to enterprisewide collaboration. For example, we are federating code repositories around the teams and across the department in
terms of cloud engineering, cloud-based software development and deployment, and security and the DevSecOps ideas. As we are able to develop those collaboration pathways, mature them and move them up the learning curve, those same pathways can scale to other types of collaboration.
What options do agencies have for managing cloud costs, governance and data?
As we tackle the enterprise-level concerns, we want to establish a preferred path that builds on the experiences of the early adopters across the components.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for example, has done a lot of work over the past four years pioneering DevOps approaches and moving a very large system, the Electronic Immigration System, to the cloud.
In addition, Customs and Border Protection has some interesting initial projects with an emphasis on advanced cloud technology around containers and security.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has also been in the cloud and has an interesting challenge around its work
in emergency response and bringing in non-federal partners.
Another area that is foundational from an organizational transformation perspective is that as we move to the cloud, our operating model is going to shift. I talked about our desire to transform to more of an as-a-service model, and we think that engaging the workforce in this bottom-up way is going to be crucial to helping folks develop skills and be an integral part of developing this future- state organization.
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