Assessing your agency’s current IT environment is a huge undertaking. But that doesn’t even cover the work that remains once your thorough assessment is complete. After vetting your current IT environment and the number of apps and workloads your agency has, as well as where they live, it’s critical to take the time to draw out a map to get from your “as-is” state to your “to be” state.
This map will be crucial to a successful multi-cloud strategy, where your IT team will need to gauge what workloads need to be containerized and ported, refactored, or rewritten entirely.
The Benefits of a Winning Strategy
There’s good reason as to why 90% of global enterprises rely on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms. This is simply because multi-cloud offers many benefits, especially for federal agencies, including:
Agility
With a multi-cloud model, many of the data integration points are exposed to the development team early. Multi-hybrid cloud tools like cloud management platforms (CMP), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and automation frameworks reduce manual steps and increase repeatability, which in turn results in speed to deployment.
Flexibility
The ability to freely move between cloud workloads, data, and applications helps ensure agencies have more portability and operational flexibility to meet the ever-changing needs of employees and constituents alike.
Predictive Performance
A multi-cloud strategy gives the ability to put predictable workloads and applications on private clouds and other workloads and applications on public cloud infrastructure to better anticipate cost and resource efficiency.
Security and Compliance
Multi-cloud can give agencies the tools to control all infrastructure and workloads regardless of their location (private or public clouds).
Efficiency
Architecting a robust-multi-cloud strategy can help decrease abandoned infrastructure with improved visibility and dynamic provisioning. Additionally, agencies can provision infrastructure based on cost to further improve efficiencies.
Start With Your “Happy Birthday Apps”
When mapping out which apps to move, focus on the “Happy Birthday Apps” first, especially if this is your agency’s first cloud migration. Often, agencies make the mistake of taking on complex applications and workloads that are mission critical. Should these require rewriting, the process can be highly time intensive and extremely difficult o execute.
Instead, by focusing on non-mission critical apps with lighter workloads, such as your “Happy Birthday App,” you can start with a simpler migration and understand how your cloud-native apps are going to respond.
Another approach to consider instead of moving an entire workload is to move only certain parts that need to be rewritten. Turn those into microservices first. Because rewrites can be especially difficult, this will make it easier to break the process down, glean lessons learned, and still have cloud-native instances in your own datacenter that are easier to manage.
Continuously Re-Evaluate
Just because a multi-cloud strategy might be winning doesn’t mean it’s meant to be set and forgotten. Even after you’ve mapped out and implemented your multi-cloud plan, it’s important to constantly re-evaluate the cloud services you’re using.
Cloud service providers (CSPs) are constantly adding to their catalogs of available services. Take the time to evaluate and determine if you need all those services instead of performing them in house. Which option is more effective? Which is more reliable? Continuously check in to ensure that your multi-cloud strategy keeps helping your agency realize all the wins a hybrid cloud environment can offer.
This blog is an excerpt from our new playbook “3 Key Phases to Help Government Agencies Successfully Navigate Multi-Cloud” by experts from Iron Bow Technologies, Dell, and Intel. To download the full playbook, head here.
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