Reality Check: How One Government Agency Knocked Down Its Cloud Barriers
March 6, 2020 / Unisys Corporation
The public sector—especially government agencies—are adopting cloud for reasons familiar to most enterprises: to better serve their stakeholders, streamline processes, reduce costs, and to have greater IT flexibility. However, as we’ve found with many other enterprises, the speed in which they can widely adopt and implement cloud can run into a variety of barriers.
A recent Unisys client—a southern U.S. state —called on us to help them accelerate their cloud adoption strategy as it was taking them months to deploy a single workload on cloud. There were many barriers to acceleration. Chief among them was the lack of internal expertise in cloud design and management. Other major obstacles included complex compliance requirements, and a lack of tools and automation, integrations with legacy systems and services, all of which resulted in too many manual operations.
Today, using Unisys CouldForte®, they can deploy workloads on cloud within minutes — with governance built-in.
And make no mistake, this client and other government agencies are not alone—even at larger commercial clients we see the same “cloud inertia” that prevents larger scale, successful deployment of resources in a timely fashion. As our recent study the “Cloud Success Barometer™” shows, long-term success with cloud is intricately tied to removing barriers and adopting cloud-centric practices.
How does CloudForte® help? In the case of our government client, we automated and tested a full self-serve AWS, Azure, and private cloud platform for them with operational capabilities built in. The service provides them best-in-class service fueled by automation and infrastructure-as-code. Part of the automation was our ability to make certain that any self-serve operations were secure, compliant and conformed to established guidelines. Our client started with a system where a computing request could take months. Now it takes mere hours because all the operational tooling and infrastructure service integrations (e.g., integration with legacy Active Directory, IP management systems) are built-in, and available on secure cloud.
Because the CloudForte® cloud management platform enables clients to use intelligent, automated self-service, it immediately relieves constraints that you have with the lack of in-house cloud expertise. This is especially true when coupled with our extensive security and compliance tools and skills. The well-architected frameworks used in Unisys automated landing zones ensures that customers like this are assured of having an environment setup in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud that meets or surpasses compliance and security guidelines they have in place. And regular “check-ups” on all systems using the CloudForte Compliance™ service provides regular, on-demand, and exhaustive analysis of the entire cloud infrastructure to ensure systems are fully compliant. Our certified, expert cloud squads support clients at every step– architecting cloud deployments, migrations, optimizations, day 2 operations and compliance. Governance and security are front and center in all the processes, making certain clients can confidently deploy cloud whenever they wish.
Artificial Intelligence-led automation, advanced compliance tools, and expert use of best practices cut the time, costs, and manual labor required in quickly and safely deploying cloud—regardless of your industry or organization. If you don’t have these, your costs are higher than they need to be, you have too many inefficiencies, your time-to-market is slower… and you may have security exposures that could come back and bite you over time. Which is why now is the time to automate and secure your cloud journey.
