IT leaders across the Federal government are reviewing lessons learned from the past few months. Most acknowledge that agencies have significantly accelerated modernization efforts as part of their work to effectively support (and secure) mass telework environments.
Cloud progress put the critical foundation in place, with the majority of Federal IT leaders leaning on a multi-cloud strategy.
Cameron Chehreh, chief technology officer and vice president, Dell Technologies Federal, shares his perspective in a recent FedTech article. “When you think of all the constraints in government, agencies have done a lot of things right,” Chehreh says. “They’ve learned fast, they’ve collaborated and they’ve made a lot of progress. And in recent years, they’ve recognized that not all clouds are the same. Today’s data-driven operations require a multi-cloud environment.”
The challenge is that multi-cloud environments bring the danger of new silos and “cloud sprawl.” A study from the Enterprise Strategy Group explored cloud progress and challenges across industries earlier this year. The findings provide advice for leaders as they mature growing cloud environments.
The research confirms use of public cloud infrastructure has tripled since 2011, and that most organizations plan to increase public cloud spending.
At the same time, enterprise IT leaders are maturing on-prem IT environments. The majority (55 percent) are increasing spending for both virtualization/private cloud initiatives and cloud-optimized converged/hyperconverged infrastructure platforms. HCI users say that these technologies free their teams from routine infrastructure management tasks.
On average, HCI users reported a 40 percent time savings on system management tasks compared to pre-HCI operations.
These time savings can be reinvested toward building and orchestrating a more effective hybrid cloud environment. The data supports the correlation: Users of HCI were 6.7x more likely than non-users to have hybrid cloud initiatives in progress that were “highly effective” at driving value for the organization (67 percent versus just 10 percent).
The research notes that, “an effective hybrid cloud environment means infrastructure parity across public and private environments, allowing organizations to choose a location for a workload, on-premises or off-premises, based on requirements and business needs, not arbitrary outside factors.”
The research showed that using HCI makes an impact, enabling these choices. Of organizations extensively using HCI, 83 percent have repatriated one or more mission-critical workloads, migrating them from public cloud infrastructure back on-premises. That figure is 20 percent higher than among organizations not using HCI (69 percent).
IT leaders see significant benefits from a consistent management infrastructure across on-prem and cloud infrastructure – reduced costs, reduced security breaches, faster migrations from one cloud to another or back on premises (reducing time required by 35 percent on average).
And, key for Federal teams, 74 percent say consistent cloud management increases the pace of innovation.
For more information, read the full study.