In today’s date, businesses and corporations in the private sector are rapidly switching to cloud strategies, solely due to the exceptional benefits it yields.
As the cloud technology evolves, it consistently brings about solid security, flexibility, and cost savings to the target infrastructure. Seeing this, private companies have been customizing and embracing multi-cloud and hybrid cloud platforms to suit their workflows.
Despite these benefits, the public sector used to be constrained and cautious when it came to employing cloud strategies. This is due to the security concerns for the considerable amount of sensitive data stored by government agencies. But as the cloud progressed, it has integrated advanced technologies to offer top-notch security to safeguard data integrity.
Let’s see how multi-cloud can really prove to be a game-changer for enterprises as well as federal government.
Benefits of Multi-cloud for Federal Government and Enterprises:
The federal government is turning up to cloud services, and this trend is only expected to grow in the near future. As per the Gartner reports, government cloud spending is estimated to increase by up to 17.1% through 2021.
Mainly, cloud adoption in government agencies is driven due to cost savings and its ability to deliver seamless services. Many federal agencies are inclined towards multi-cloud environments to avail the best services on off-prem public and on-prem private clouds.
Here are some of the top reasons why multi-cloud environments are the best for the federal government:
1. Flexibility and Portability
A multi-cloud environment offers exceptional flexibility, as you get to choose different cloud providers and avail the best services from them. Another great advantage of multiple clouds is that enterprises can switch between clouds to reduce the risk of service disruptions and get better up time. If one provider fails for some reason, they can have a solid backup of another provider to keep their services up and running without any hindrances.
Often, cloud providers offer unique features and benefits that meet the primary needs of government agencies.
2. Solid cybersecurity
Data security is the top priority of federal agencies. When it comes to cloud, lack of visibility and control over security practices of cloud can really raise concerns.
Multi-cloud mitigates these concerns by allowing federal agencies to choose their right cloud environment and desired level of security for every working model. Multi-cloud environments offer excellent security benefits. Most cloud providers integrate automated security to safeguard your data integrity. Besides, automation frameworks will allow you to automate security policies and compliance.
Google recently launched BeyondCorp Remote Access as its very first commercial product solely for network security. This cloud-based service takes a zero-trust approach and allows employees to access internal web apps from any location, using any device without the need for traditional remote-access VPN. The product is highly beneficial for the remote global workforce, as it assigns policies and rules to VMs, workloads, or network connections, and only allows essential connections, rejecting all the other ones.
The right set of tools and security policies will protect your applications to the core. Agencies must make sure to select optimal cloud providers such as Google Cloud and their tools to effectively support their objectives. With this, government agencies need to also practice continuous monitoring of applications and data for better integrity.
Federal agencies need to make sure they choose cloud providers that’ll let them treat cloud as an operational model, whilst providing insights into security policies.
3. Importance of Containers and DevOps
To reap maximum benefits out of multi-cloud environments, government agencies need to automate their development procedures with the help of DevOps and container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes.
Containers are nothing but a software technology that automates and facilitates the process of application deployments across multi-cloud environments.
DevOps (the combination of “developer” and “operations”) is a culture where the developers’ team and operations department collaborate seamlessly to build, test, deploy, and upgrade applications.
Both these technologies aim to drive automation, top-notch security, and agility into cloud environments. These platforms are capable of providing crucial benefits to government agencies and enterprises with multi-cloud environments.
Containers are hot in trend right now as they allow developers to containerize (breakdown) applications into their core elements. This approach makes applications more transferable, flexible, and highly portable to move across clouds.
On the other hand, orchestration management systems like Kubernetes are here to assist developers in automating container deployments and their management. Today, containers act as an important application development tool for multi-cloud environments, and the same goes for DevOps.
Another great example of a security tool is Anthos - a platform designed to let you run Kubernetes clusters anywhere (on-premises and cloud environments). With Anthos, you can define, automate, and employ security policies across the environment to suit your compliance needs. Anthos integrates top-notch security into every step of the application development- right from their initial build to run.
4. Transparency
Government agencies often need to change the way each workload is used and stored. And, multi-cloud environments allow that kind of flexibility and transparency to them.
Multi-cloud environments allow federal agencies to choose how every workload or data set is stored, used, and managed. This approach not only prevents vendor lock-in but also promotes continual improvement in technology.
Agencies must look for transparency and flexibility in each step of cloud vendor agreements, right from expenses, speeds to security. This way, agencies can scale as per the workload- adding or removing the capacity to meet their operational needs.
With multi-cloud, the federal government not only gets a choice in infrastructure but also saves costs of federal technical debt.
Future of Multi-cloud for Federal Government
Single vendor cloud hosting always comes with the risk of vendor lock-in and lack of innovation. Due to this reason, the federal government is starting to incline towards a multi-cloud approach to get more benefits and access to innovative services.
Government agencies have now understood that cloud is an all-inclusive operating model that will empower their compliance needs and scaling goals. It helps you with digital transformation whilst providing seamless agility, readiness, security, and scalability.
When implemented correctly, a multi-cloud approach can help federal agencies in keeping their data secure with the seamless use of agency resources. The time has finally come for the federal government to look at multi-cloud environments as a potential solution to mitigate their security and compliance challenges, and those are a few examples of capabilities that CEdge brings to allow both private and public sector customers to navigate with confidence their cloud journey and implement multi-cloud projects.
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If you want to learn more about cloud computing, DevOps solutions, cybersecurity, or how digital transformation can help you accelerate your outcomes, contact us!
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