“As federal agencies shift data and IT operations to the cloud, some are exploring new technologies like artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to track and control cloud spending.”
“The Department of Veterans Affairs is one agency still working to migrate IT operations to the cloud and is using AI to streamline the process.”
“’We have 25% of our workload running in the cloud,’ said Executive Director of Infrastructure Operations Reggie Cummings at an ACT-IAC webinar on controlling cloud spend last week. ‘There are a lot of things we are doing from an AI perspective, also our handling and processing of mail or other kinds of things that would traditionally have a backhand solution, we’re looking to automate those in a robotic way so we don’t have to look at traditional constructs of server storage builds and stuff like that. [We are] looking at those cloud native capabilities that are out there for those solutions.’”
“For the VA, keeping a direct line of sight on cloud spend is a critical component of cloud operations…”
“To cut costs and organize cloud spending more efficiently, the Department of Homeland Security took a step back to think through its cloud vision.”
“’Late 2016, we quickly did an assessment of where we were from a business perspective,’ said Customs and Border Protection Executive Director of the Enterprise Management & Engineering Directorate Edward Mays at the webinar. ‘My data center was highly functional, but we were spending a lot of money. We started to look at what that spend looked like and how to reduce that spend and help us deliver capability to our customers faster, our officers and agents in the field, and was that going to improve our resiliency?’”
“CBP, in particular, suffered ‘numerous’ power and hardware outages, resulting in ‘astronomical’ capital expenditure costs, Mays said…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA and DHS Are Looking to Reduce Cloud Spend – By Kate Macri, August 19, 2020. GovernmentCIO.
