Page 20 - FCW, August 2021

Maximizing the Benefits of Multi-Cloud
Taking a fresh look at cloud’s
potential
Jason Payne
CTO, Microsoft Federal
control plane to inventory, organize and enforce policies for their IT resources wherever they are.
A coherent model for modernization
Agencies need to understand the business goals for a particular cloud-based application or workload and then make decisions about the best architectural approach. They also need a comprehensive security model that’s architecturally coherent from a deployment and operations perspective. The model should take into consideration the entire life cycle of applications as agencies modernize into the cloud.
By combining the security and compliance aspects of modernization
with a coherent IT architecture, agencies can drive down costs for managing
those applications in the cloud. The cost savings can allow agencies to fund further modernization efforts or conduct research and development activities around core workloads or advanced capabilities such as artificial intelligence.
Furthermore, agencies that want
to take a cloud-agnostic approach should employ an infrastructure-as- code approach. They should also be strategic about choosing what to deploy on different cloud platforms and should develop on portable technologies, such as containers and microservices. In addition, they should use orchestration tools to deploy applications and adopt services that are certified by the vendor-
As the need for resiliency, agility and cybersecurity grows, so does the reality of multi-cloud and hybrid systems
THE PANDEMIC DISRUPTED the government’s way of thinking about delivering citizen services and other missions. Now agencies aren’t looking to cloud for elasticity or cost savings alone, but as a platform that enables them to improve their cybersecurity posture and support an ability to deliver on their missions.
Agencies have learned a valuable lesson about the need to respond to adversity in an agile way with a set of resilient services. As pandemic restrictions ease, agencies have an opportunity to reevaluate how
they deploy and manage multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments.
Agencies should assess higher-order value propositions when deciding what runs on what cloud. And even though agencies run a mix of applications
on premises, in multiple clouds and
at the edge, it’s important to have a
single governance model for migrating applications to the cloud, integrating
them with other applications, and then managing and securing data in those clouds. Our customers consistently tell us that what they really need is a cloud-native
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