Agencies Push Aggressive Multi-Cloud Efforts Across Government

Federal agencies are racing to modernize their cloud infrastructure, and leaders from the National Nuclear Security Administration, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the General Services Administration outlined their ambitious cloud efforts at the GovCIO Media & Research Federal IT Efficiency Summit Wednesday. 

Kayla Gunter, associate CIO of IT at NNSA, described a sweeping transformation underway over the past two years. The agency operates six classified networks and a new unclassified environment with AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform called the Joint Unclassified Communications Environment (JUCE). 

“We are moving very, very quickly on robust classified and unclassified multi-cloud environments. … We are deploying in an unclassified environment and then reproducing what we are doing in our classified environment. And our classified environment is a multi-cloud classified environment, which is quite new to us. We’re excited about it,” Gunter said, noting that having a strong infrastructure enables the Genesis mission.  

Wade Zarriello, acting director of infrastructure and user services at CMS, described a similar undertaking at his agency. In the last eight to 10 months, CMS has been integrating a high-fidelity, reliable and resilient multi-cloud ecosystem. His agency was once nearly 90% reliant on AWS, but has since operationalized new Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud environments, while migrating from Azure Government to Azure Commercial for better services and cost efficiency.  

“We can talk about multi-cloud all day and talk about the theory and hypotheticals all day, but actually doing is something we’ve had a lot of success on,” he said. “We’ve gone live with our first multi-cloud application that has a front end that runs in AWS. It has a database and microservices that run in Google and traffic back and forth across dedicated interconnects between the two clouds. And the team has found a lot of success getting over a lot of hurdles as it relates to networking, security, scanning, all of the things that you need to do in order to operationalize brand new cloud environments for our customers.” 

Michelle Davis, senior director of solutions architecture at Red Hat, offered a framework for agencies beginning their cloud journey: abstract your complexity, automate everything and adopt a workload-first rather than cloud-first mentality. She cautioned that moving workloads back on premises is already happening at agencies that moved too fast without assessing whether a given workload actually belonged in the cloud.  

“Look at the security requirements, the performance requirements of your workload and best determine where they go,” Davis said.  

On the procurement side, Jonathan Plante, senior cloud hardware and software strategist at GSA, urged agencies to invest heavily in integrated product teams before a contract is awarded, bringing together contracting officers, cybersecurity, data and operations personnel to surface risks early.  

“You really need to pull in the product team. … Your business, your cybersecurity, your data, your operations team that’s going to own it in the end, your technical team that’s going to help you write the requirements, making sure that you’re up to date with the technology,” he said. “Have those passionate discussions, work through the challenges before you go to contract, identify the risks and have a game plan because once you write that contract, you’ve identified your requirements, post-award it becomes a lot more difficult to change pace.”