Page 26 - FCW, August 2021

Maximizing the Benefits of Multi-Cloud
The elements of a strong cloud
portfolio
Christopher Radich
Regional Vice President, Public-Sector Digital Strategy, Salesforce
BCG and Salesforce links digital customer experience to trust in government.
To ensure that their portfolios are complete, agencies should perform market research on various customer engagement software categories and make investments in customer engagement centers, digital experience portals, and business intelligence and analytics.
Customization: The root
cause of IT failures
Custom code is arguably the root cause
of most IT challenges in government. For example, the Alliance for Digital Innovation, of which Salesforce is a member, released
a study that found the federal government could have saved $345 billion over 25 years if it had embraced commercial technology rather than building systems from scratch.
In order to improve customer service and reduce their dependency on custom solutions, agencies should implement a multi-cloud strategy that is not solely based on rehosting and refactoring applications on infrastructure solutions.
Agencies need to make sure they adopt a mix
of software as a service
Agencies need to build a targeted mix of as-a-service offerings and move away from custom code
IN 2021, CLOUD COMPUTING
has become synonymous with IT
modernization and is now the de facto service model across government. Different agencies, ranging from small to large and with various missions, have embraced commercial cloud offerings because of their scalability and security advantages.
Given the depth of multi-cloud environments, agencies must adopt
a strategic approach to selecting and managing their cloud platforms. To prevent the analysis paralysis that occurs when conducting a portfolio assessment across thousands of applications, agencies should leverage contract renewals as an opportunity
to evaluate their legacy systems and assess cloud products or services. As agencies will have a mixture of clouds and legacy systems for the foreseeable future, it’s important they use APIs to connect clouds to one another and to legacy data sources and applications. One example is MuleSoft, which identifies, integrates and aggregates data.
Agencies evaluating a multi-cloud
strategy should also prioritize improving mission services for internal and external stakeholders. This is especially relevant because the Technology Modernization Fund has linked IT modernization and cloud adoption to improved customer experience. In addition, the “Trust Imperative” report by
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