What’s Really Smart About the White House Cloud Smart Strategy?

“Moving an application from a traditional data center to a virtualized infrastructure vendor generally does not enable automatic application scalability with increased user demand. Cloud Smart attempts to focus on how that application is used to meet the mission and what it will take to truly modernize it.”

The White House just released its new strategy to update the Obama administration’s Cloud First policy. The draft Cloud Smart policy establishes workforce, procurement and security as the main pillars of the strategy, three areas the administration often links together when talking about IT modernization.

“Historically, policies have isolated these areas, creating confusion and a misunderstanding of requirements, mission and needs,” the strategy states. “However, they are deeply linked, and require an integrated, interdisciplinary approach, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach to IT modernization.”

Through our work across industries, we see business leaders eager to tackle cloud transformation. They want to meet the increasing demands for intelligent, immediate, and immersive digital experiences. And these demands raise the stakes for IT teams to accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies while ensuring their infrastructure is available and ready to adapt to change.

At the same time, new technology adds to the complexity and raises the risk of unplanned outages or regulatory non-compliance. If you don’t account for the complexities and interdependencies across the IT landscape you risk delays, breakdowns, and disruption to critical business services, impacting company revenue and producing internal frustration.

We recently worked with a global financial services company to help them lay the foundation for implementation of an ambitious IT transformation strategy utilizing public cloud.

Their IT Transformation goals were to:

• Reduce holdings of IT assets
• Optimize their IT investments
• Reduce the total cost of ownership – and instead strategically invest in IT
• Adapt a more agile development environment
• Allow the pursuit of new technologies – without adding risk

With these ambitious goals in front of them, the company’s IT leaders faced daunting choices about how to do this. To do that, putting together a good cloud migration plan is a must.

They came to TDS to leverage our SaaS collaboration software and proven methodology to improve their understanding of their environment and orchestrate the retirement, consolidation or migration of their vast portfolio of applications, and generate cost savings and efficiencies.

At TDS, we believe that conventional project management methods are insufficient to plan and execute today’s complex or time-sensitive migrations which encompass interdependencies spanning all levels of infrastructure and subject matter experts in the company.

The results took a high-level strategy and turned it into an actionable road map that will accelerate and standardize their decision-making process across 12 line-of-business portfolios and set the stage for a successful three-year project which will:

• Accelerate cloud migrations using VMware Cloud on AWS as first stage and leveraging the current operational knowledge of VMware tools in place.
• Improve overall planning and execution efficiencies as a result of the automation, collaboration and real-time executive dashboard view of application migration status using TransitionManager.
• Hit retirement milestones more aggressively, while retiring more applications sooner due to automated aggregation of data from data sources of record.