There are many benefits to moving government workloads, applications, and data from legacy hardware and physical data centers into the cloud. Provisioning new cloud services is faster and easier than acquiring and setting up physical hardware, making the cloud inherently more scalable.
Many cloud solution providers offer advanced tools and solutions that can open the door to cutting-edge capabilities – including data analytics and AI. And then, there’s the cost. In many cases, the cloud can be a more economical option than utilizing physical hardware and data center space.
These benefits have caused many agencies to make the decision to migrate their applications, workloads, and services to the cloud. However, some have fallen behind. One reason why some agencies may be reticent to embrace the cloud is that migrating workloads can be quite daunting. This is especially true for agencies that have IT personnel and workforces that are not as well trained or well versed in cloud computing as they are in the provisioning and maintenance of legacy hardware.
“With agencies becoming more accepting of the cloud and having a better understanding of how it works, we’ve seen the government become more agile to be able to respond to citizen needs more rapidly.” – Dominic Delomlino
Considering the perceived heavy lift of migration and modernization, is the cloud really worth it? What opportunities and capabilities does it enable for government agencies? And how have cloud migrations actively benefited government agencies that have made the leap?
These – and other questions – were answered during a panel discussion entitled, “Getting the most value from your cloud,” at Red Hat’s recent Annual Government Symposium. This panel discussion featured a number of leading cloud experts, including:
- Sam Hultzman, System Owner of NFIP’s Pivot System for FEMA
- Kevin Tunks, Chief Architect and National Technology Advisor at Red Hat
- Dominic Delomlino, Vice President of technology and innovation at Amazon Web Services
During their discussion, these experts took a deep dive into the benefits that the cloud delivers for government agencies, the reasons why some agencies might be hesitant to embrace the cloud, and how containerization can make cloud migration less painful and difficult.
The benefits of moving to the cloud
As we discussed, cloud technologies provide the foundation for becoming more agile, collaborative, and cost-efficient.
Moving to the cloud essentially allows agencies to transfer some of their operations to third-party servers accessible via Internet connectivity. This creates the capability to have variable data packages and rapid expansion and mobility without the fear of downtime, crashes, or permanently lost data.
Agencies that adopt the cloud can innovate quickly, scale efficiently, and even foster new market capabilities at a rapid rate. And the cost savings can be used to enable other, mission-critical technology programs – even with small IT budgets.
According to Hultzman, “From network performance to storage performance, using the cloud is five times faster, at one-fifth the cost. This not only allows us to reinvest that saved money into new technologies and capabilities for the system to meet our needs, but it allows us to deliver those capabilities faster.”
“It’s not a full rebuild of your applications. They’re already containerized. They’re just being migrated. Same with the databases. There are some changes with the infrastructure, but it’s not like other systems that aren’t containerized—making moving this data a much bigger lift.” – Dominic Delomlino
In today’s digital age, technology is rapidly advancing and changing—making it difficult, and sometimes costly, for agencies to continuously modernize their legacy systems. Worse, that outdated infrastructure can struggle to keep up with the demands of modern solutions— impeding the systems operating capacity and keeping agencies from embracing new advanced technologies.
According to Hultzman, “…we had to look at what changes and investments we need to make to keep us modernized. We needed to calculate if this would provide the needs of our system and for the users to be valid for the next few years. We’re looking at new data analytics tools to provide better capabilities for our analytics and Policy Branch and all the things that can speed up our services to the customer.”
Reliance on legacy systems and hardware can keep agencies from embracing advanced solutions that are the cornerstone of government modernization initiatives, including data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). Ultimately, the cloud is an enabling technology for all of these advanced capabilities.
According to Delomlino, “With agencies becoming more accepting of the cloud and having a better understanding of how it works, we’ve seen the government become more agile to be able to respond to citizen needs more rapidly. And you can’t do that if you have this idea that that system is carved in stone, and it can’t adapt or take advantage of innovation. And when something happens, you can’t tell the customer that the system is still being built and you’ll get back to them. The system has to be able to react in real-time. Being on the cloud creates the ability to do this.”
Fear of the unknown slowing cloud adoption
Despite its ability to increase efficiency and open the door to new, advanced technologies, many agencies remain hesitant to move to the cloud. Many of them cite the fact that they’re unfamiliar with it, concerned about security, or view cloud migration as a heavy lift as the reasons for their reticence. But the cloud can be secure, it can be easy to use, and migration doesn’t have to be a challenge.
According to Delomlino, “there’s some obvious hesitancy with the cloud and how that may look from a security standpoint. So we had to work with folks on what it meant to move over there.”
When it comes to migrating workloads and applications, the evolution of containerization has made the process significantly easier. Containerization is essentially the packaging of software code together with the operating system libraries and dependencies required to run the code to create a single lightweight executable—referred to as a container. This allows that data to run consistently on any infrastructure.
“It’s not a full rebuild of your applications. They’re already containerized,” said Delomlino. “They’re just being migrated. Same with the databases. There are some changes with the infrastructure, but it’s not like other systems that aren’t containerized—making moving this data a much bigger lift.”
Hultzman offered an incredible analogy for containerization when he explained, “The move to the cloud through containerization is a lot like moving a mobile home from one lot to the next. We didn’t have to change the applications or databases, and there were minimal architecture changes in that regard. So containerization is the biggest thing that helped us in our move to the cloud.”
By embracing containerization, government agencies can make cloud migration easier and more efficient. But does the migration from legacy hardware and systems to the cloud really really pay dividends for government agencies?
FEMA improves citizen service with the cloud
Up until 2019, FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) was working on a forty-year-old mainframe, and – with its legacy systems – it could take thirty to forty-five days for flood insurance policies to take effect or pay claims. The agency knew that it needed to modernize its systems and get them into the cloud, but it also knew that a move from mainframes to the cloud was a complicated step to take.
“From network performance to storage performance, using the cloud is five times faster, at one-fifth the cost. This not only allows us to reinvest that saved money into new technologies and capabilities for the system to meet our needs, but it allows us to deliver those capabilities faster.” – Sam Hultzman
According to Hultzman, “After several failed attempts in 2016 to get off this mainframe, DHS selected Pivot as one of its five agile modernization products. The next obstacle was getting these systems in place, and the need of replacing some of our legacy systems. So, the choice we made early on was to use OpenShift 3.11 and go the route of using containerization— making our move to the cloud much easier.”
And, as Hultzman would later explain, taking that leap into the cloud has paid dividends for FEMA:
“Through this cloud-based environment, we’re able to deliver capabilities faster so that we can meet the need of disaster survivors for the insurance companies. We’re building new environments for performance and data analytics, and we’re going to have multiple pipelines to do deep dives into our data to have a better understanding of disasters like hurricanes coming. Who has policies? Where are most claims generally happening? How do we preposition resources to meet the need once the disaster of the hurricane has moved down? So the cloud truly does give protection for agencies in multiple regards.”
