With the rapid change and disruption inherent in the tech landscape, the transition to a Cloud and/or Hybrid Cloud solution is imperative for IT innovation and optimization, not only in the commercial space, but also in the federal government.

If you are like most federal agencies, you are in the process of migrating your Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) applications. You might also be working on addressing your legacy systems as a result of the government’s focus on IT modernization. This has created challenges for agencies as they prepare to transition from legacy platforms and applications to an integrated cloud environment. Developing a Best in Class (BIC) cloud migration plan that aligns with government initiatives and mandates is key to meeting your agency’s cloud initiatives.

NITAAC CIO-CS and CIO-SP3 Small Business contract holder, Ideal System Solutions, Inc. is here to help agencies not only understand the cloud assessment and migration process, but to also help agencies successfully transition to the cloud environment.

According to a study by Gartner, the growth in enterprise IT spending on cloud-based offerings will be faster than the adoption of traditional, non-cloud solutions. In fact, over $1.3 trillion in IT spending will be directly or indirectly affected by this shift to cloud by 2022. The chart below shows how legacy systems, with custom-developed applications and outdated technology, decrease in value and increase capital expenses (CapEx) over time.

Legacy infrastructure consumes more budget with an ever-decreased benefit impact -- time to revenue

Legacy systems pose significant challenges in transitioning to the COTS platforms residing in the flexible cloud data centers of today. Federal government IT organizations that successfully transition their legacy systems to the cloud will dramatically increase performance, decrease CapEx and operational expenses (OpEx) and extend their delivery capabilities.

In order for a federal agency to migrate to the cloud, they first need to determine their scope by analyzing current workload, agency objectives, existing systems and IT resource utilization. Involving stakeholders at the cloud assessment and migration planning phase is critical to understanding the needs of different departments within the organization and helps ensure that all concerns are being addressed.

Ideal uses agile methodologies for its Cloud Readiness Assessment process to look at unique, agency-specific mission priorities and IT roadmaps to develop a step-by-step migration plan that mitigates risks, develops new capabilities and provides full, scalable cloud functionality.

When it’s time to modernize traditional applications (MTA), Ideal can identify an agency’s traditional legacy application and platforms, create a stand-alone test lab environment with modern platforms, technologies and tools, and modernize an agency’s application preparing it for transition to a cloud platform. Once application functionality is validated and platform capabilities are monitored and finalized in a test environment, the customer can migrate the application into its modern cloud infrastructure.

The benefits of migrating to the Cloud can be significant. “With careful planning and a strategic phase-in approach, successful migration to the cloud can be achieved,” says Greg Reyes, Vice President, Business Development at Ideal.

Results from a successful cloud transition include:

• Shared resources and lower costs
• Flexible capacity management
• Increased storage and computing power on demand
• Diversified and aligned management of IT infrastructure
• Faster application implementation and deployment
• Expansion of geographic reach – allowing employees secure access to applications from anywhere
• Transition IT expenditures to a pay-as-you-go model (CapEx to OpEx)

If you would like to learn more about Ideal’s portfolio of Cloud Assessment and Migration services, you can reach them through the NITAAC Customer Support Center at 1-800-773-6542 or email NITAACsupport@nih.gov. You can also use our electronic-Government Ordering System (e-GOS) for research or to submit a Request for information (RFI) on various cloud solutions.