Steve Orrin, Cameron Chehreh: Agencies Should Embrace Hybrid Cloud as Operating Model

Steve Orrin, chief technology officer at Intel’s federal arm, and Cameron Chehreh, CTO of Dell Technologies’ federal business, wrote in a joint article published Friday on Nextgov that federal agencies should look at hybrid cloud not as a destination but as an operating model to realize the benefits of artificial intelligence and 5G.

“With cloud at the center of a whole new operating model, organizations will have distributed DevOps teams spinning up new applications in real time,” they wrote. “The goal is not to deploy a brand new edge node for every mission. Instead, it’s to build new applications on the existing node to meet changing demands.”

They cited how the Federal Emergency Management Agency adopted cloud as an operating model and used the same infrastructure to support other missions, such as managing logistics and housing and doling out financial aid to displaced individuals.

Orrin and Chehreh called on agencies to initiate steps to be cloud-native and adopt a risk-based approach to security in an edge environment.

“Being cloud-native lets federal agencies leverage cloud infrastructure for a wide range of objectives. Even as the underlying infrastructure becomes more complex, software simplifies it,” they wrote. “Agencies must make sure they shift their entire paradigm, integrating developing apps in a distributed manner and baking security right in.”