In the U.S. federal government, the concept of a “Cloud First” began and spread into the commercial sector. Is it a feasible option for any organization? Some success stories worth considering:

The United States chief information officer declared Cloud First to all federal agencies in December 2010. More than half of all federal agencies had taken cloud computing for one application, at least as shown in the Congress report by 2012.

An earlier government IT initiative, the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), was followed by the Cloud First mandate. FDCCI has tracked 1,000 federal data centres that have closed to date or are scheduled to close in 2014. Cloud-delivered applications are a direct result of cloud-paid applications.

Cloud First has its share of detractors instead of apparent government success, including HealthCare.gov’s trouble-prone launch. Studies quoted by Detractors indicate agencies don’t move to the Cloud fast due to a scarcity of federal technical expertise in cloud installation, which led to blame for slow adoption.

In the Government Sector, the Success of Cloud

There are many examples of productive cloud installations within the federal government, including the following examples:-

• U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA): This helps move email to the public Cloud with more than 100,000 employees. Simultaneously, an internal private cloud was run by it and enhanced by other entrepreneur solutions. Internal/external cloud constructs saved USDA $75 million in its first three years.
• Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB): The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has created RATB to track stimulus spending. RATB saved $854,800 two years after migrating Infrastructure as a Service to the public Cloud.
• Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives(ATF): The production of huge agencies and cloud platforms doesn’t have to be implemented. With 4,700 employees, ATF saved $1 million a year after moving email to the Cloud.

The success of the Cloud in the Commercial Sector:

One company that made a strong move into the Cloud is Veyance Technologies, a 6,000-person manufacturing firm based in Ohio in the commercial sector. Veyance IT group typically supports about 120 applications for its size, and a variety of operating systems on multiple servers in hosted locations allows it to run that application.

According to CIO John Hill, Veyance wanted to avoid its multi-local, siloed architecture to enable the company to operate as a “true global entity.” A traditional IT infrastructure very well known to limit this ability, Hill entered a Cloud First campaign of its type. Veyance applications moved to Virtustream, a cloud-based service provider specializing in business applications like SAP. Every migration application is available: physical-to-physical, virtual-to-virtual, physical-to-virtual, and even brute-force heterogeneous data migration.

Nearly 100 workers and dozens of vendors completed on budget in less than seven months without unplanned downtime. Impressive results are delivered by complete cloud migration: in hosting costs, a 30% reduction in equipment, labour and licensing costs with an increase in significant capacity. When information silos were removed, streamlining and coordinating global operations was capable by Veyance and overall productivity and collaboration were improved.

Moving Forward in the Cloud:

• Choose providers with care: The service provider is “enterprise-focused” and provides “robust support” for many enterprise scenarios regarding cloud computing.
• Inventory is critical: There is a need for “the new user environment”. An extensive inventory is performed to define unknowns or dependencies.
• Standardize: The company properly standardize servers, network technologies and storage, which are highly scalable and high-performance.
• In migration and colocation, look for expertise: Complex migrations can be managed to work with providers, and workloads that won’t be moved to the Cloud can be colocated.