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Kirk Kern, chief technology officer for cloud at NetApp‘s U.S. public sector practice, has outlined five strategies that federal agencies can adopt when restructuring their IT systems for a cloud environment, FCW reported Wednesday.
According to Kern, agencies are increasingly turning to the cloud and other IT re-architecture solutions to address concerns with operational costs, resource utilization and storage efficiency.
He noted that federal IT leaders and decision-makers should look into several factors when making the decision on a potential re-architecture, including the extent or scale of change.
Kern highlighted the need to identify the agency’s strategic goals or mission to set requirements and expectations of the result, such as better customer experience or faster services.
He also said that they should determine the particular IT infrastructure or services to migrate to the cloud, like core applications or sensitive data.
After identifying goals, agencies should have a definition of their profile, including the services they require, so they can set a budget, timeline, metrics on the return of investment, quarterly reviews and so on.
Kern indicated that they should also document existing challenges to be used as basis for informed decisions regarding the re-architecture.
Finally, the IT organization should work with the project sponsor to analyze and assess operational and business risk based on the applications that will be migrated to the cloud and on the type of cloud infrastructure that will be used.
