For government agencies thinking about journeying to the cloud, it's all about data, according to IT cloud services veteran, Ahmed Hassan.
“Trying to connect the dots for government, and the way we look at journeying to the cloud in government, it is all about data. Data plus data plus data," said Hassan, who is Accenture's ANZ health and public service infrastructure and operations lead.
Hassan is a 20-year veteran of delivering services to public service organisations at the federal and state level. Over the past 14 years, he has had extensive experience working with large scale federal government projects.
The “first critical step” for government agencies considering moving to the cloud is to undergo a “data security classification,” which will determine the type of cloud the organisation should select, says Hassan, who spoke about digital transformation, cloud, applications and data as part of CeBIT's egovernment stream on enhancing digital services and engagement.
“The second step is having the data in motion, which is the network performance, and the third one is the data processing, which are the applications themselves.”
In terms of network performance, he said government agencies need to consider the speed, the bandwidth, and the security of the network connections.
“When you are deploying applications to the cloud, if the applications are very chatty to each other, with a lot of network traffic between them, then the recommendation is to put them in the same cloud.
"Relying on intra-cloud communications, or intra-cloud networks, is not usually recommended. And if you have to do that for one reason or another, that would have to be very well tested,” he said.
On the application front, for example, he said start with the business considerations in terms of the application roadmap (considering the practicality of the application, the confidentiality of the data on the application, and the minimum allowable downtime for the business for that application). On average, organisations have between 60 to 200 applications to be considered.
Overall, Hassan said both private and public sector operations are being urged to look at cloud solutions first for infrastructure, applications and services, making it a top priority.
“Cloud is assumed these days. A lot of our clients are not talking to us about whether they should move to the cloud or not. But they are talking about, ‘when do I move to the cloud? And how do I move to the cloud? That is the discussion that we are having at the moment,” he said.
“It is now all about the higher value benefits of moving to the cloud, whether it’s PaaS or SaaS or infrastructure-as-code. Agility and DevOps are hot topics ... and government departments are seriously starting to move into that space now,” he said, adding ‘serverless’ is picking up momentum and where the cloud is headed.
“Serverless is exciting. You don’t even need a server to run your code. You give the code to the cloud and it runs it for you, which doesn’t apply to all cases, but there are certain cases where it does it quite well and scales quite nicely.”
He said today it’s difficult to find a government client that isn’t using the cloud in some shape or form, either for DevOps, storage or for production workloads. “Every government department, even the National Security Department, are using it in one form or another,” he said.
Hassan said there are three phases to consider when journeying to the cloud including: strategy, assessment and roadmap; transformation and migration; and cloud management and optimisation.
“The No. 1 approach in starting your journey to the cloud is identifying why you want to go to cloud.
