Most agencies in the public sector are facing flat to declining budgets. This isn’t breaking news, but this downturn in budget is causing CTO, CIO or IT managers to evaluate their IT systems in an effort to reduce costs.
Mission-leading CIOs are embracing new technologies and service models that allow them to make IT faster, cheaper and smarter, but most importantly make their organizations more responsive.
This leads to performance optimizations or wholesale re-architecture initiatives that improve storage efficiency or resource utilization of their IT assets. Efforts to reduce cost and improve efficiency often involve cloud services.
With organizations increasingly interested in bringing the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud services into their IT delivery model, they should look to these five key considerations before getting started:
- Define organization/agency goals or mission
- Define services required to support goals
- Define financial profile to achieve goals
- Identify IT challenges of existing framework in satisfying goals (fit for performance, mobile, cost, security, strategy)
- Engage or modify net-new and cloud architecture analysis
Agencies must do research on the solutions and determine what options best meet their specific needs. A private cloud might be the best option, but don’t discount public clouds and hybrid clouds, which enable an agency to determine how and where information is stored as well as give them more control over accessibility. In fact, for most agencies a hybrid solution really is the best of both worlds because of the flexibility it brings. In the end, however, regardless of whether organizations move from private to public clouds or to a hybrid model, a primary concern revolves around maintaining control of data and simplifying operations across a multi-cloud environment.
COMMENTS