Page 47 - FCW, June/July 2021

FCWPerspectives
Cloud
after
COVID
More than a year of pandemic operations has altered government’s view of cloud-centric modernization
The past 15 months have cemented the importance of moving employee- and customer- facing systems to the cloud, but many agencies are still far from that desired end state. In some cases, budget and leadership buy- in remain insufficient, and the challenges of moving to zero trust security loom for virtually every organization.
FCW recently gathered a group of IT leaders to explore how a year of maximum telework and nearly all-digital operations has altered the role cloud services play in supporting agency missions. The discussion was on the record but not for individual attribution (see page 47 for the list of participants), and the quotes have been edited for length and clarity. Here’s what the group had to say.
Collaboration is a game changer
Perhaps the biggest change partici- pants noted was the way cloud collabo- ration tools took hold. “We’ve taken advantage of a lot of the collabora- tion apps that are available in cloud platforms,” an official from a smaller agency said. “We hadn’t anticipated needing those so badly.”
The embrace of new services also jump-started work on existing systems. “Other collaboration tools where work kind of stagnated throughout the years all of a sudden are getting pushed to the forefront,” an executive from a larg- er agency said, adding that the chal- lenge now is “how do we connect them all to make sure that they continue to give us the capabilities we need?”
“There’s no doubt that COVID sig- nificantly changed how we do busi- ness across the enterprise,” another participant said. “The ability to col- laborate was a game changer. And I think we let the genie out of the bottle. So now we have folks who never had the ability to collaborate the way they can today expecting that going forward for everything.”
The biggest collaboration example
was Commercial Virtual Remote — the Defense Department’s emergency deployment of Microsoft Teams for all of DOD. At the time of the roundtable discussion, CVR was just days away from shutting down in favor of perma- nent, service-specific tenancies. Across DOD and in civilian agencies, the new expectation “is that that’s the way we are going to work,” one official said. “So how do we keep that?”
Improving identity, credential and access management will be essential, another participant said, especially with military personnel moving to multiple systems. “Being able to bring folks into the collaboration space eas- ily — identity is the key,” he said. “So we need to make sure that we do it right, but we have to move quickly on it because the expectation is that if we don’t, they’re going to call in two weeks and say, ‘Turn CVR back on.’”
The virtualized work environment has brought other complications. One executive recalled hosting a call to dis- cuss security concerns with a broad range of stakeholders. More than 100 participants called or logged into the platform, and the organizers quickly
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