As cloud-based services become the norm, Federal leaders are encouraging agencies to focus on cloud-native architectures in order to get the most out of their cloud approach.
During the Pillars of Modernization virtual event hosted by FCW, Raj Iyer, the CIO for IT Reform at the Office of the Secretary of the Army, stressed the importance of utilizing all the benefits the cloud has to offer.
“Cloud-first is a given. I mean, I would be surprised if anybody did anything these days that did not start with a cloud-first approach. But more importantly, it’s about cloud-native architecture,” Iyer said. “Just getting to the cloud is not the end game. It’s how we modernize with cloud-native architectures, leveraging containerization, microservices, APIs, and all that good stuff, so that we can truly take advantage of the cloud and what comes with it.”
Iyer said the Army has recently focused on centralizing the cloud adoption process so they avoid having “separate clouds that just would not talk to each other.”
Similarly, Eric Quinn the director of global IT modernization at the Department of State, said synching up different cloud networks across the globe is the agency’s next challenge. By having the right cloud-native architecture, agencies can increase collaboration between IT teams and ensure that agencies do not run into file conflicts, Quinn said.
“I want to make sure that a consular officer who was evacuated and is working from D.C. is able to access the same information that their colleague is at post,” Quinn said. “One of the new projects that we’re working on as we’re getting ready to push multi-tenancy to a wider audience is, how do we identify what those workloads are, move them from post to the cloud or back as necessary and do the syncing, and ensure that you don’t have conflict between two files.”
