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ly, enabling the agency to ramp up a pilot application. If it doesn’t work, it only takes a few minutes to abandon the experiment. If an agency’s field staff needs an application to quickly alert a population about a Zika outbreak, IT can quickly build, test, and deploy a mobile app while also alerting communities through other digital channels.
The cloud also provides opera- tional agility to manage across a hybrid mix of cloud options
(public, private and virtual private) as well as on-premises data centers. With the right cloud-based tools, agencies can manage all this through a single console. Oracle Management Cloud2, for exam- ple, helps IT staff manage not only Oracle clouds, but clouds from other vendors. It combines machine learning, anomaly analysis, log and predictive analytics and IT analytics to manage workloads.
Incorporating cloud technology
to improve IT management can
also save agencies real money, as
the state of Texas demonstrated.
The state’s Dept. of Information Resources developed a private community cloud pilot program for
IT infrastructure services available
to all state agencies. With this service, agencies can deploy large- scale platforms and services they might not otherwise be able to afford. After the pilot, state officials estimated that agencies had reduced IT infrastructure costs by up to 35 percent, and were able to access large-scale frames and platforms that were previously too costly.
“One of the things we’ve tried to do is avoid the consideration of a cloud offering as a product and instead look at the cloud characteristics,” said Texas CIO Todd Kimbriel. “This means thinking about flexibility in metered
Finding Top Talent in the Windy City
The City of Chicago reviews more than 300,000 applications every year for government positions. This manual process typically took months.
By moving the process to Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, the city has reduced the number of candidates requiring manual screening by 75 percent, cut the time to hire from a year to 90 days,
and saved millions of dollars annually in recruitment costs. Oracle’s cloud-based solution also automates hiring workflows, ranks top candidates automatically, and simplifies the HR audit process to help the city meet its privacy and information security requirements.
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billing, self-service orchestration, handling peak demand through elasticity, and ease of access.”
Mix and Match Your Clouds
A combination of on-premises and cloud-based data and apps often makes the most sense. An agency might keep critical, custom-written legacy applications on-premises, for example, while using ERP and other core business applications in the cloud.
Agencies also can choose to use the cloud for specific situations requiring greater flexibility, such as cloud bursting for spikes in usage. “Often, the best choice is to build for the steady state on-premises and burst into the cloud. It’s a matter of running the numbers and picking and choosing,” says William Sanders, director of cloud platform strategic programs for Oracle Public Sector. ”
In addition, many government agencies simply cannot keep
up with the specialized staffing requirements for certain kinds of IT. “Agencies can offload work that’s not in their sweet spot and send it off to vendors,” Sanders said.
The ability to choose what makes sense financially and practically gives agencies the greatest possible flexibility. The best way to do that is
by choosing a vendor with a broad set of cloud services that also understands how to move legacy applications to the cloud. Many cloud vendors are specialized firms that offer highly targeted Software- as-a-Service (SaaS) components, with no real knowledge of how to integrate with existing systems.
Ideally, the vendor’s cloud services will be fully integrated
at every level: SaaS, PaaS, and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). With an integrated cloud ecosystem, agencies can reap the full benefits of using the cloud while avoiding
the perpetual upgrade cycle that occurs with multiple cloud vendors in the mix.
“Cloud is really about how workloads can be delivered to
our customers, not about the technology,” Kimbriel said. “As a result, we really wanted a solution that takes into consideration technology, processes and people and how combining the three could help drive the mission.”
For more information, please visit cloud.oracle.com/public-sector
2 http://gocouncil.cio.com/cio-executive-council-innovation-report?utm_campaign=IT%20Innovation%20Report%202016&utm_source=cio.com