Agriculture Department Uses Hybrid IT Model to Speed Field Data Processing
The Agriculture Department is vast, with about 100,000 employees and 17 component agencies, making it a behemoth in the federal IT community. Yet one of those component agencies, the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), aims to stay nimble by using a hybrid IT approach.
NASS conducts thousands of surveys and publishes more than 400 reports every year, including commodities futures reports on important crops like corn, cotton and soybeans, according to NASS CTO Michael Valivullah. Hybrid IT gives agencies and other organizations the benefits of both off-premises public cloud and on-premises private cloud.
NASS strives to use hybrid IT to increase its data center capacity and help both internal stakeholders and external customers, such as farmers, Valivullah told FedScoop. Hybrid IT allows NASS to quickly add capacity when needed and could allow the agency to take advantage of emerging technologies like the Internet of Things and virtual reality.
“We would like to look at hybrid IT in a way that actually adds value, not just for the sake of new technology,” he says.
The hybrid IT model increases agility and capacity, and also boosts efficiency at NASS, Valivullah says. It has made it much easier for the agency to add virtualized servers, for example.
“We call it ACE,” he says. “Agility is No. 1 because in olden days, for a server to be spun up, it took us two weeks. Now, we can do it within hours.” Shifting to the cloud and embracing virtualization has helped enhance NASS’ agility, he says.
NASS has legacy IT systems running in the background that it must continue to support, Valivullah says, but the agency also needs to “create new avenues to take advantage of the new technology to add more value” to users and the broader public.
NASS wants to enhance the use of precision agriculture, which relies on satellite technology to observe, measure and respond to variability in crops in the field, according to Valivullah. Moving forward, he says, the agency also wants to use data from connected combines and field sensors for climate, moisture and other variables.
