Hybrid Cloud and its Transition in Government Agencies

Here are three ways government agencies can facilitate and accelerate their move to the hybrid cloud.

FREMONT, CA: The cloud spending of government agencies is reaching all-time highs, with a lot of organizations investing in hybrid cloud models. The hybrid environment uses an arrangement of on-premise public and private cloud services and presents a principle solution for institutions wanting to balance security and agility.

Notably, a hybrid cloud enables users to select industry-leading components from various computing environments and bring them together into a transportable technology stack. The benefit facilitates users to deploy workloads to diverse, targeted clouds automatically.

Despite the advantages, most organizations are overwhelmed by the lack of an industry standard for hybrid cloud migrations. Agencies using on-premises equipment often are not sure where to start. Also, some may be unfamiliar with open source tools that can accelerate migration and aggregate data to the cloud. Furthermore, a few lacks an understanding of the policy and security considerations of multicloud and public and environments.

However, for the most part, agencies have observed the private sector’s embrace of multicloud and hybrid cloud as inevitable. Because of the predictability, various organizations have integrated either of the two cloud computing environments into their IT roadmaps, but the systems are at different points along their journeys. The ambiguity also has a large proportion of entities unclear on how to get alongside the cloud expedition.

To eliminate the issues, below are three ways government entities can facilitate and speed up their move to hybrid cloud.

To Create a Single Source of Truth

To leverage several cloud environments, organizations need the aptitude to create the surroundings on demand. The process is challenging as it requires not only the code but also the design for all deployable artifacts in the system. One way to begin the practice is to start building the Single Source of Truth (SSOT). The source will store not just the application dependencies and code, but anything that is required to create a setting from version control. 

The SSOT will contain things such as database schemas, application code, automated tests, environment creation tools, documentation, and release notes. The structuring helps organizations to build environments in a repeatable way despite the foundation of the cloud chosen for the workloads.

Drive Competences with Kubernetes, APIs, and other Tools

The use of different tools to supervise multiple cloud settings can result in a cumbersome task. So, agencies can make the transition easy by adopting industry standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and tools. Kubernetes, in effect, has become the de-facto API for cloud workloads. The system can be used to abstract the agencies cloud deployment in an infrastructure-agonistic manner, regulating how organizations build and run the applications. For conventional virtual machines, open-source software can facilitate entities to routinely provision applications across cloud providers. 

Default to Open with Organization’s Data

The movement of data between cloud environments is a complex task and can often be expensive. Most cloud providers make the process easy when it comes to ingesting the data and difficult to move the information out. Traditional enterprise workloads use proprietary database-to-database or storage-to-storage data transfers to sync the applications. Not only are the techniques cost-prohibitive, but most devices and databases are not available in public cloud environments. So, organizations can tackle the issue of cost by planning the role of data ahead in time. The plan involves knowing how much data does the agency has, how it is classified, what datasets can be run, and where along with the cost of moving the information around. Furthermore, organizations can avoid the use of proprietary APIs and technologies and switch to open source technologies and interfaces, which can be optimized in any setting.

While the strategies are necessary building blocks for multicloud and hybrid environments, they are preferably paramount practices that agencies should adopt regardless of their infrastructure. Collectively and individually, the methods represent basic application and data management practices that can help agencies become more proficient and agile. 

The hybrid cloud environment has the potential to transform any government agency accurately. Although there are a lot of things to consider before leveraging cloud computing technology, the optimization of open source tools can assist migration in a faster and efficient way.

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