Federal agencies have embraced cloud strategies as foundational to their transition to digital government, but their approaches come in many different flavors of cloud. As they’ve come to see the benefits, more agencies are adopting a hybrid cloud structure – one or more public and private cloud services that operate as separate but integrated entities. Hybrid cloud provides the cost optimization, agility and scalability of public...

According to the National Association of State CIOs, the top two enterprise risks faced by state governments in 2022 are cybersecurity and technology. Cybersecurity includes everything from data protection and ransomware to identity theft and stolen network credentials. Technology risks include aging or obsolete systems, data management, and handling cloud portfolios, to name a few. Addressing these risks is part of modernizing and transformin...

While government agencies continue their migration to the cloud, concerns about security continue. A recent survey by Fidelis Cybersecurity found that 95% of cybersecurity professionals are extremely to moderately concerned about public cloud security. Their top three concerns: misconfiguration of the cloud platform (71%), exfiltration of sensitive data (59%), and insecure APIs (54%). These are the fears that haunt government IT professionals,...

It has been more than a decade since the Obama administration adopted a “cloud first” strategy for IT modernization. The policy shifted in 2019 to a “cloud smart” approach. Agencies across the federal government have been including cloud migration in their digital transformation initiatives over this period. But 10 years is a long time for any digital technology, and as cloud computing has matured its long-term drawback...

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program – FedRAMP – has been in place for more than a decade now. It has always been a great vehicle for moving government IT workloads to the cloud and into secure government-approved environments. Increasingly, FedRAMP is enabling faster adoption of cloud services and reducing organizational risks and costs associated with the sustainment of traditional government-owned equipment and...

The advent of cloud has been a boon to organizations, giving them the power and speed to vastly expand their compute capabilities. And the advent of cloud has created new security challenges, as enterprises have limited control, visibility, and network security across a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment. There are different approaches to providing security in a multi-cloud architecture, from relying upon cloud service providers’ ow...

Governments everywhere and at all levels should be applauded for finding ways to meet their citizens’ needs during the pandemic. While many agencies had continuity-of-operations plans in place, no one imagined that every agency would have to act on them at the same time. What made it possible, of course, was the rapid spread of cloud-based technology that enabled government employees to work from their own homes, frequently using their o...

Just as in the private sector, almost every federal agency is investing in digital transformation, to streamline processes, cut the cost of maintaining legacy systems, and unlock the potential of new technologies to deliver new and enhanced services. Agencies see the potential in hybrid cloud solutions, which require understanding how transformation advances the success of their missions. The challenges in executing digital transformation succ...

The recent cybersecurity Executive Order emphasizes the need for more structure and to start moving toward a Zero Trust architecture. This architecture is a broad strategy that follows the mantra, "Never trust, always verify," and assumes untrusted actors already exist both inside and outside agency networks. By moving federal agencies toward Zero Trust, their resources can stay protected through an architecture that adapts to the complexity o...

The Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community (IC) have entered a new age of warfighting, where battlefields exist in the digital realm as much as the physical one. This makes moving to the cloud a mission imperative, but the resulting multi-cloud and hybrid landscape can lead to immense operational complexity. Managing that complexity is critical to the success of IT modernization projects both currently underway and contemplated...