“Moving to the cloud comes with a number of benefits, but Federal experts on April 6 stressed that agencies still need to implement good cloud governance and management processes in order to control costs.”
“At the Data Center Sustainability Summit, co-hosted by the General Services Administration and the Information Technology Industry Council, Gerald Caron, the CIO and assistant inspector general for information technology at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG), said understanding how to manage an agency’s cloud deployment is the key to cost avoidance.”
“’Something that people are still starting to come to realize is how to manage in the governance of the cloud infrastructures,’ Caron said. ‘It’s like at the home, if you leave the water on, guess what? You’re paying for every gallon of water that keeps going. So, turn things off when you’re not using them… there’s a management aspect of it, but the great thing about the cloud is the flexibility it provides.'”
“Caron explained that while the cloud takes away many of the problems that come with the management of a physical data center, there are now different things that need to be managed. Caron manages a multi-cloud ecosystem at HHS, but said his team is ‘drawing up the governance around that as we go along.'”
“HHS is working on developing better planning as it goes, but Caron said the cloud allows the agency to ‘spin down services’ if they’re not using them and just as easily spin them back up as needed…”
“David Catanoso, acting director of Application Hosting, Cloud, and Edge Solutions at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), said his agency also has a program to understand how to ‘optimize your spend in the cloud…'” Read the full article here.
Source: Cloud Governance Critical to Control Costs, Feds Say – By Grace Dille, April 7, 2022. MeriTalk.
