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TRANSITION 2016: NEXT-GEN CLOUD TOOLS
HOW TO DRIVE DIGITAL GOVERNMENT
Transform your agency by transitioning entire workflows to the cloud.
SPONSORED CONTENT
BARRY LEFFEW
VICE PRESIDENT PUBLIC SECTOR, ADOBE SYSTEMS INC.
THE REAL POWER of the cloud
lies in the maturity of the technology within an agency. For many agencies, cloud technology is often viewed as an infrastructure play—the ability to reduce capital expenditures while improving scalability and uptime. Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) technology becomes a clear value driver in agency IT portfolios.
Over time, the IaaS technology delivers distinct benefits in the areas of reliability, scalability and global availability, but those benefits are often limited because they are bound to the infrastructure. The true magic happens when agencies layer Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) components on top of the IaaS. This is the point at which cloud maturation happens.
When an agency matures its approach to cloud technology, greater benefits can be realized. The manner in which content is created, managed, delivered and measured begins to change, and operational tempo naturally increases. Content becomes more secure, regardless of device or location. Organizations become more agile as people, processes and technology mirror the cloud and evolve to support a service model. At this point, continuous deployment also becomes a reality. And by adding a Managed Services approach to the portfolio, agency benefits continue to grow as the challenges and complexities of cloud management are removed. The service provider continuously delivers ongoing updates and services up
the entire technology stack and across all workflows throughout the agency.
There are four considerations to ensure your agency can take advantage of cloud maturity:
1. Speed Matters: The sooner you can adopt cloud solutions into your agency, the sooner you are able to mature. It doesn’t have to be all at once.
Surgical pilots that deliver proof-of-concept can help an agency mature its approach. Also consider that managed services implementations can take less than two weeks.
2. Start Layering Clouds Over Workflows:
Get beyond the “single cloud, single application.” Moving standalone applications can be beneficial, but won’t transform your agency. Neither will cloud storage. To achieve the benefits associated with cloud maturity, you have to transition entire workflows. Transitioning elearning workflows is a great place to start.
3. Secure at the Content Level: FedRAMP pro- vides a standard approach for assessing and moni- toring security, but agencies need more. Beyond a firewall or perimeter security, agencies need to se- cure data in a way that supports multiple workflows, multiple networks, multi-factor authentication, multiple devices and multiple users. Agencies have had great success with user-based security technol- ogy such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), which persistently encrypts and protects sensitive information wherever it goes. Applying DRM to cloud-based documents can ensure its security at all stages of the data lifecycle.
4. Geographic Redundancy Is Important:
Environmental, geographical and even political factors affect uptime and cloud data center reliability. Consider the “Snowzilla” storm earlier this winter—both the weather and cloud usage spike had negative impacts in the Northern Virginia area, through which 70 percent of the world’s Internet traffic flows. Cloud vendors with geographic redundancy nimbly managed both the physical and digital storm.
The cloud is delivering great benefit to government agencies. With greater maturity, it can catapult your agency to new levels of performance, agility and security.
Barry Leffew is the Vice President Public Sector for Adobe Systems Inc.
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