The biggest concern with cloud mandates? Too many initiatives 

The Office of Management and Budget recently marked the first anniversary of its official Cloud Smart strategy, which serves as a road map for agencies securely adopting cloud-based applications and platforms through a more streamlined procurement process.

Although agencies now have a greater understanding of the plan to fully migrate to the cloud, they face another critical barrier -- identifying the data they have. When agencies operate with legacy infrastructure, data is often siloed, which means employees can’t identify where information lives. This is problematic because without such visibility, agencies cannot make informed decisions about what data should move to a cloud ecosystem and what should be kept in an on-premise data center.

And that’s just one piece of the cloud adoption puzzle. There are myriad other modernization initiatives, including the Federal Technology Acquisition Reform Act, the Data Center Optimization Initiative, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) and federal acquisition contracts that require agencies to update their digital infrastructure and accelerate their cloud adoption process.

Agencies face increasing pressure from Congress and the administration to meet the criteria of these modernization initiatives. But let’s not put the cart before the horse -- agencies must first gain a greater understanding of what data they have. This key step can be achieved by modernizing their networks, giving them a holistic view of their data, wherever it lives.

Through network modernization, agencies will not only make substantial headway in their move to the cloud, but they will also achieve these three common goals outlined in federal mandates:

Mitigating security concerns

Agencies regularly face multiple security threats, from phishing to malware attacks. As they prepare to move their most critical datasets to the cloud, agencies that don’t have visibility into the activity on their networks increase their risk  of experiencing a cyberattack.

After all, a typical federal network is complex -- containing endpoints, access switches and wireless entry points -- all of which can serve as loopholes for nefarious actors to access and compromise an agency’s data. However, agencies can mitigate these security concerns by adopting pervasive security measures that bolster the security of every network layer, including switches, routers, Wi-Fi access points and firewalls.

A pervasive security approach enables agencies to support a range of deployment models without compromising their security posture, whether it’s moving data to an on-premise data center or a physical deployment to public cloud environments.

Scaling the enterprise

As federal agencies work to meet the mandates outlined in ongoing policies and initiatives, legacy networks can hinder their ability to do so, as the technology simply lacks the sophistication to scale, which ultimately causes data to live in silos.

Cloud Smart urges federal agencies to leverage “tools and analytical capabilities that scale across multi-cloud environments in the facilitation of continuous visibility and information sharing.” Adopting a software defined wide-area network allows agencies to simplify operations for any scale of the enterprise and deliver high performance for any virtual workload.

Standardizing procurement

There is no shortage of requirements that agencies must meet when retrofitting their digital infrastructure. OMB’s M-19-13 Memorandum on Category Management released in March 2019, requires agencies to replace decade-old procurement policies and strategies with modernized approaches that leverage the standardization needed to effectively secure their data.

Because legacy networks are so limited when it comes to physical scale, they often fail to meet the criteria outlined in federal IT contracts. Agencies cannot access the cloud without cloud-ready and secure network connectivity. Cloud procurements should include modern network requirements to ensure secure connectivity.

For this reason, federal agencies must take a two-pronged approach to addressing this problem:

• First, in parallel with procurement policy modernization, legacy networks must be modernized to support cloud adoption.
• Next, agencies must ensure their workforces are taking certification requirements into account and are considering cloud-based commercial offerings that help standardize cloud contracts issued across the federal landscape. After all, Cloud Smart calls for federal employees to take the steps needed to gain the skills that are critical to achieve a 21^st century government.

It’s imperative that agencies balance procurement standardization with healthy competition of best-of-breed technology and proper stewardship of taxpayer dollars. Some recommendations include utilizing Section H in solicitations for ensuring subcontractor competition or creating an approved product list from which agencies and contractors can select a preferred and vetted product.

Standardizing cloud contracts across the federal government can enable all agencies to realize better procurement outcomes, seamlessly adopt FedRAMP-authorized cloud-based technology and ultimately ensure their cloud migration is a success.  

Cloud adoption is critical to the government’s modernization, and more than ever, federal agencies are faced with meeting countless requirements. Network modernization is a logical first step toward agencies’ cloud-readiness.

By taking a streamlined approach to the multitude of requirements, updating their networks and ensuring healthy category management competition, agencies can achieve common objectives outlined in federal mandates, which include fewer security risks, greater scalability and more standardized procurement processes.