Jason Payne, chief technology officer at Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) federal arm, said multicloud environments enable government agencies to broaden their technology options and select the best cloud platform to meet their mission requirements.
Payne wrote that multicloud adoption begins with the implementation of a strategy that looks at factors that are key to an agency’s mission.
“When agencies have a goal of capitalizing on multi-cloud and migrating applications or workloads seamlessly from cloud to cloud, they end up embracing modern tools and practices such as DevSecOps, infrastructure as code, interoperable container-based application architectures, and cloud-native tools that drive security and decrease the time needed for accreditation,” he noted.
Payne cited that integrating multicloud environments into the information technology portfolio of agencies comes with security challenges, including the need to safeguard the agencies’ data, devices, applications, identities and infrastructure.
“Agencies can improve governance by leveraging cloud platforms’ built-in security tools and then deciding where they need to govern horizontally across multiple cloud platforms,” he said.
He also called on agencies to train their employees to understand the common cloud principles, including compute, storage, network and how such principles are implemented across platforms.
“Within that base of knowledge, team members can then develop specialized skills on individual cloud platforms based on agency and mission needs,” Payne added.
