Adelaide O’Brien, Research Director, IDC Government Insights, talks with John Furrier & Rebecca Knight at AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington D.C.
#AWSPSsummit #IDCGovernmentInsights #theCUBE
https://siliconangle.com/2019/06/17/thought-leadership-elevates-government-into-the-cloud-awspssummit-womenintech/
Thought leadership elevates government into the cloud
It’s no secret that the U.S. public sector is struggling to adapt to the information age.
A report issued last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office studied 65 aging legacy systems still in operation. The highlights show the appalling state of the systems controlling public services: The Education Department still runs on Common Business Oriented Language, the Department of Homeland Security has 168 high or critical vulnerabilities, and Health and Human Services is working with hardware from the 1960s.
No wonder the road to cloud computing is a bumpy one for the public sector.
“The federal government … has been under about a 10-year directive to go cloud first, and what we’ve seen is a lot of agencies … have struggled,” said Adelaide O’Brien (pictured), research director of government digital transformation strategies at International Data Corp. Government Insights.
O’Brien spoke with John Furrier and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed how Amazon Web Services Inc. is assisting the U.S. federal government with its cloud computing strategy (see the full interview with transcript here.) (* Disclosure below.)
This week, theCUBE spotlights Adelaide O’Brien in its Women in Tech feature.
A valued thought leader on government cloud
Approachable and unassuming describe O’Brien’s demeanor as she discusses the changes underway in the federal government. Her undisputed depth of knowledge comes from a career that spans both government and information technology. From her start working for state and local government in Minnesota, O’Brien moved into a successful corporate career with companies such as Honeywell, AT&T, Avaya Holding and Lucent Technologies.
Uniting her experiences, she joined information-technology market analysis provider IDC, where she conducts research into the opportunities and risks involved in IT modernization, with a focus on government strategies. O’Brien holds two master’s degrees, an MBA in marketing, and a MPA in public administration.
O’Brien is a sought-after adviser and speaker, with a lengthy list of credits and awards. Her research is frequently quoted in leading industry media outlets, such as CIO Magazine, Forbes and Government Technology, and she was named in 2018’s Federal 100 list of leaders in government IT.
It’s better to be smart than first
The government’s Cloud-First initiative was launched at a time when public cloud was king. Now the pitfalls of wholesale cloud adoption are better understood, and “research shows that ‘cloud first’ isn’t first for federal agencies,” O’Brien said.
In October 2018, the federal cloud computing strategy was modified from Cloud First to Cloud Smart. The new strategy has workforce, procurement and security as its main pillars. Not coincidentally, these three areas are also the main barriers to agencies’ successful adoption of cloud.
Reduced cost is one benefit to moving federal agency workloads into the cloud. Those aging systems need constant repair, and it ain’t cheap: O’Brien quotes a figure of $75 billion for maintaining legacy equipment.
But saving hard-earned taxpayer cash isn’t the only benefit to cloud adoption. “It wasn’t just to be more efficient, to save some of that money … but it was actually thinking about using cloud to be very agile, to help deliver better citizen services,” O’Brien stated.
Cloud Smart supports the objectives of 2017’s Modernizing Government Technology Act, according to O’Brien, meaning that both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are now supporting the federal move to cloud.
A most-trusted gov cloud provider
The biggest barrier to moving to cloud is, and has always been, security. To ensure agencies only used products and services from secure sources, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, created a special certification category for cloud providers to receive authorization and approval. Dominating the FedRAMP marketplace is AWS, with 139 services approved within AWS GovCloud and 129 for AWS US East/West.
...
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
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Adelaide O'Brien, IDC Government Insights | AWS Public Sector Summit 2019
Adelaide O’Brien, Research Director, IDC Government Insights, talks with John Furrier & Rebecca Knight at AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington D.C.
#AWSPSsummit #IDCGovernmentInsights #theCUBE
https://siliconangle.com/2019/06/17/thought-leadership-elevates-government-into-the-cloud-awspssummit-womenintech/
Thought leadership elevates government into the cloud
It’s no secret that the U.S. public sector is struggling to adapt to the information age.
A report issued last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office studied 65 aging legacy systems still in operation. The highlights show the appalling state of the systems controlling public services: The Education Department still runs on Common Business Oriented Language, the Department of Homeland Security has 168 high or critical vulnerabilities, and Health and Human Services is working with hardware from the 1960s.
No wonder the road to cloud computing is a bumpy one for the public sector.
“The federal government … has been under about a 10-year directive to go cloud first, and what we’ve seen is a lot of agencies … have struggled,” said Adelaide O’Brien (pictured), research director of government digital transformation strategies at International Data Corp. Government Insights.
O’Brien spoke with John Furrier and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed how Amazon Web Services Inc. is assisting the U.S. federal government with its cloud computing strategy (see the full interview with transcript here.) (* Disclosure below.)
This week, theCUBE spotlights Adelaide O’Brien in its Women in Tech feature.
A valued thought leader on government cloud
Approachable and unassuming describe O’Brien’s demeanor as she discusses the changes underway in the federal government. Her undisputed depth of knowledge comes from a career that spans both government and information technology. From her start working for state and local government in Minnesota, O’Brien moved into a successful corporate career with companies such as Honeywell, AT&T, Avaya Holding and Lucent Technologies.
Uniting her experiences, she joined information-technology market analysis provider IDC, where she conducts research into the opportunities and risks involved in IT modernization, with a focus on government strategies. O’Brien holds two master’s degrees, an MBA in marketing, and a MPA in public administration.
O’Brien is a sought-after adviser and speaker, with a lengthy list of credits and awards. Her research is frequently quoted in leading industry media outlets, such as CIO Magazine, Forbes and Government Technology, and she was named in 2018’s Federal 100 list of leaders in government IT.
It’s better to be smart than first
The government’s Cloud-First initiative was launched at a time when public cloud was king. Now the pitfalls of wholesale cloud adoption are better understood, and “research shows that ‘cloud first’ isn’t first for federal agencies,” O’Brien said.
In October 2018, the federal cloud computing strategy was modified from Cloud First to Cloud Smart. The new strategy has workforce, procurement and security as its main pillars. Not coincidentally, these three areas are also the main barriers to agencies’ successful adoption of cloud.
Reduced cost is one benefit to moving federal agency workloads into the cloud. Those aging systems need constant repair, and it ain’t cheap: O’Brien quotes a figure of $75 billion for maintaining legacy equipment.
But saving hard-earned taxpayer cash isn’t the only benefit to cloud adoption. “It wasn’t just to be more efficient, to save some of that money … but it was actually thinking about using cloud to be very agile, to help deliver better citizen services,” O’Brien stated.
Cloud Smart supports the objectives of 2017’s Modernizing Government Technology Act, according to O’Brien, meaning that both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are now supporting the federal move to cloud.
A most-trusted gov cloud provider
The biggest barrier to moving to cloud is, and has always been, security. To ensure agencies only used products and services from secure sources, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, created a special certification category for cloud providers to receive authorization and approval. Dominating the FedRAMP marketplace is AWS, with 139 services approved within AWS GovCloud and 129 for AWS US East/West.
...
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)
