“Email, in many ways, is the original enterprise application because literally everyone in an organization uses it. IT departments in government and industry alike have always turned to email as the first application to deploy on new platforms. First on mainframe terminals, then on local area networks, then on enterprise networks.”
“Now email is, for many large organizations, the first application moving to a cloud-hosted platform. A case in point: the Veterans Affairs Department, one of the first federal agencies to move email and related employee productivity software off its servers and into a commercial cloud environment. With five years of experience using, in this case, Microsoft Office 365, VA’s IT staff has learned lessons they’re applying to the expansion of cloud activities on a significant scale.”
“Among the lessons, according to Dave Catanoso VA’s director of Enterprise Cloud Solutions, is simply this: ‘Don’t be afraid to do it. You really have to just be confident you can succeed and move forward…'”
“As VA gets past the applications that are easy to “lift and shift” to the cloud, Catanoso said, migrations require more planning and technical work so that applications can take advantage of services offered natively by the commercial cloud provider. For its enterprise cloud efforts, VA has contracts with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.”
“To enable future migrations, Catanoso said, his office has created a service called VA Platform One. It ‘is designed to put in a standardized way for VA to containerize applications, and use microservices’ from cloud providers, he said. ‘And really take advantage of all the cloud optimization capabilities out there. We have teams using the cloud at various levels, but we’re trying to make it more standardized.'”
“As it proceeds with moving hundreds of applications, Catanoso said, the VA Enterprise Cloud is taking an unorthodox approach…” Read the full article here.
Source: Cloud Exchange: VA leaning on cloud services to accelerate application modernization – By Tom Temin, September 17, 2021. Federal News Network.
