There are laws of science and nature that have been exhaustively researched and conclusively determined leaving little for doubt for most people. When it comes to determining a cloud strategy, the laws are not irrefutable, but there are some universal considerations that should be made when identifying what is right for your organization. There are numerous schools of thought about how to best deploy and maintain a secure multicloud environment. In a recent webinar, an expert panel across industry and public sector examined government CIO priorities. One key takeaway that emerged were three “laws” of multicloud deployment, which provide a framework for agencies to identify the right cloud solution that will meet their unique needs.
#1 – The Law of Economics: Cost Considerations Come First
In a recent cloud strategy survey, 72% of federal IT leaders ranked cost control as a very or extremely important consideration for cloud adoption. While cloud offers potential cost savings up front, agencies have to look at the economics of where the workload needs to sit, and its connectivity into legacy infrastructure. Moving to the cloud, at times can be more expensive in the public cloud than running something on-premise in a private cloud. A common scenario playing out with increasing frequency is the need to access historic data for AI modeling. Storing data in the public cloud is less expensive, until you need to extract it. Egress charges are making it extremely costly to remove this data. As more agencies adopt AI, they will be turning to massive volumes of data to “teach” the models. Depending on where that data resides, these organizations could be incurring unexpected costs to use their own information. Ultimately, cloud is really more about the operating model than the destination and looking at the long-term demands on that model will help determine which one is best suited for you.
#2 – The Law of Physics: Optimize the User Experience
The second area to focus on is speed and performance. Because the speed of light is only so fast, it’s important to weigh what is possible versus what is desired. When agencies are hosting their workloads across multiple cloud environments, where applications and data reside can impact performance and the ability to deliver a better end-user experience. For time sensitive applications where latency is a factor, is it better to have data reside at the edge or will the experience be better if it’s centralized?
Data management and performance are inextricably linked to an optimized cloud user experience. Agencies are leveraging cloud monitoring tools, balancing workloads between public and private clouds and working with providers that specialize in hybrid multi-cloud to achieve higher levels of performance and deliver better user experiences.
#3 – The Law of the Land: Ensuring Compliance with Regulations and Laws
The “law of the land” addresses the statutory, regulatory and compliance needs for federal agencies and strategizes where workloads need to reside and what protections are in place to maintain the integrity and security of this information. For example, there are requirements that specify how long different types of information must be retained, where it should reside and who can access it. This is a critical component for federal IT leaders, in fact, 87% believe that maintaining Federal cloud compliance is critical to upholding their agency’s security posture.
As the volume of information generated daily continues to grow at an exponential rate, agencies must have a strategy to manage this influx of data. Industry leaders recommend using these three laws as guidance to leverage the advantages that multicloud and software-defined data centers have to offer. With a sound data management and data protection strategy, federal IT leaders will be better positioned to execute on their compliance and cyber strategy while tapping into the economic benefits of the as-a-Service model. To learn more, read our recent article, “Reach for the Cloud: Choosing the Right Model to Help Your Mission Soar” to hear more about adapting to a changing technology landscape.