Let’s Talk About IT Ep. 20 — The Continued Push to the Cloud

Despite being more than a decade into the journey to the cloud, many federal agencies are still just in the nascent stages of adopting a widespread cloud model.

On this episode of Let’s Talk About IT, a pair of cloud experts — Brian Merrick, director of the State Department’s cloud efforts, and Jim Matney, vice president and general manager of the DISA and Enterprise Services Sector for General Dynamics Information Technology’s (GDIT) Defense Division — explain the progress made in recent years in the federal adoption of cloud and the challenges agencies have faced along the way.

Merrick said that despite the high-tech context of the cloud, ultimately a smart migration is about the business need. “We’ve really looked at cloud and leveraging cloud as a way to help us accelerate our ability to deliver better business outcomes,” he said.

But not all agencies have been as successful in planning and making moves to the cloud. Why is that? Matney pointed to lack of funding, the complexity and “also the readiness of their infrastructure. It’s more than just migrating the application into the cloud. Your infrastructure has to be able to enable users to be able to access and leverage those applications.”

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This episode was sponsored by GDIT. Visit GDIT’s website for more on its offerings.

This podcast is part of a FedScoop special report on the Continued Push to the Cloud. Read the rest of the report.