Red Hat’s Mark Bohannon: Agencies Should Implement Cloud Infrastructure Based on Mission Needs

Mark Bohannon, vice president for government affairs at Red Hat, has said the U.S. government needs to implement agency-appropriate cloud environments and address issues with legacy systems to drive digital transformation amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an opinion piece published Monday on FCW, Bohannon wrote that agencies have to be critical on choosing their cloud vendors based on factors such as mission objectives, ownership and location.

He said that agencies should consider hybrid cloud environments that will enable them to incorporate an information technology architecture that ensures workload portability while mitigating reliance on vendor-locked systems.

According to Bohannon, agencies must not launch modernization efforts for the sake of updating technologies and avoid developing government off-the-shelf technologies that require open-source or “zero-cost” software without guaranteed support.

“The reality is that in the long-term, to ensure we are better prepared, we must resist the temptation for the government to build its own technology solutions and …increase investment in commercial technologies that enable hybrid cloud,” said Bohannon.

"We are still at the beginning of digital transformation," he noted.