Page 14 - FCW, August 2021

Maximizing the Benefits of Multi-Cloud
Empowering the
government’s
earliest adopters
To fully experience multi-cloud’s benefits, agencies must support the innovators in their ranks
Sean Maday
Cloud Engineering Manager, Google
off-load some monotonous day-to-day IT management tasks in favor of higher-level activities. If there are only a handful of people in an agency’s IT organization, they could spend all their time creating new storage clusters and provisioning that storage as data collection increases. If an agency can leverage the automation that comes with cloud to store and replicate data and then make sure that data is backed up and protected, the agency
can enable those individuals to focus on true data analysis, data science and data discovery.
Some government agencies are
already adapting to these rapid changes by empowering innovators inside the organization as pathfinders and scouts who are looking for new and creative ways to solve challenges and improve citizen services.
In his 1962 book “Diffusion of Innovations,” Everett Rogers suggested that in any given organization, 2.5% of members will be innovators. They are
the people who think about the world differently and try new things. They
are the earliest of adopters. Rogers was looking specifically at how farmers and others in the agriculture industry adopted technology, but much of his work is relevant to today’s technology issues.
Best-of-breed approaches to problem-solving
Agencies with large workforces have the potential for a correspondingly large number of innovators. For instance, if
MULTI-CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS offer efficiency and innovation,
which benefits government agencies, their stakeholders and ultimately taxpayers. Fully unlocking the innovations that cloud makes possible requires agencies to change some aspects of how they operate.
For instance, traditional models for technology adoption and acquisition must be reevaluated so that agencies can keep pace with the breakneck speed of change in technology. In addition, IT leaders need to find ways to apply governance and policy across many different clouds.
Agencies can also make the most of
multi-cloud’s benefits by supporting their earliest adopters.
Using automation to unlock innovation
Multi-cloud environments offer agencies the opportunity to go beyond simply managing data to analyzing it for valuable insights and better decision-making. Cloud technology was created to deal with the exponential increase in data collection
and the increasing demands for storage. In other words, cloud was developed to handle big-data challenges.
Furthermore, cloud technology offers tremendous opportunities for agencies to
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