Breaking Down Cultural Barriers to Cloud Adoption for Federal Government Agencies

While security concerns often top the list of reasons for federal agencies to slow the adoption of cloud-based innovations, there are often deeply embedded cultural and process hurdles that should be addressed.  

In addition, the commercial sector has proven out how the first- and second-generation cloud computing innovations have achieved cost-savings, agility, and increased IT system performance on an enterprise-level.

Much like the commercial arena, the first step to embracing cloud adoption in government is by making cultural and process changes. Although this might seem much easier said than done, the following steps demystify the process for smooth transitions into the cloud.

Steps for Breaking Down Cloud Adoption Barriers for Government

Following are the cultural steps that agencies can take to move forward on any cloud adoption plan.

Enhance Communications: As with any optimized business culture, effective organizational communications – both top-down and bottom-up – is vital. This involves all CIO-level mandates being clearly understood by IT staff. One way to ensure CIO mandates become centralized is to create video messages from the CIO to share agency-wide, which clearly state goals and mission, as well as gets people excited. Conversely, IT staff should be free to voice their concerns and challenges up the chain of command.

Overcoming Fear of Change: Change is difficult for any organization, especially for IT teams who are accustomed to certain technologies. Rather than fearing change, migrating to the cloud can be positioned as an opportunity for everyone to expand their skill sets, seek out new training opportunities, and be part of the overall change.

Optimize Processes: While most federal IT leaders and staff understand the value of cloud computing, the right processes might not be in place to help enable the shift. All processes should be fully optimized and updated to extend from on-premise to the cloud environment. In addition, all updates should be shared with industry partners to minimize time-consuming exception requests. For example, thinking ahead about how cybersecurity will interact with the shifts to the cloud ensures that the required plans are in place for an effective transition.

Update Manuals to Extend Into the Cloud: Existing manuals may be great for on-premise IT, but may not integrate well with new cloud technology. As with optimizing processes, updating internal manuals for making this transition is paramount. It will also help with avoiding schedule delays, especially if the manuals have been updated before the official migration efforts.

Determine Workload Responsibilities: Although an agency may have a good understanding of how IT responsibilities are assigned for on-premise work, the introduction of cloud environments, and new cloud processes, could stretch work responsibility definitions where there’s no clear owner of the workloads. This could ultimately halt work progress. As such, it’s also important to have all workload responsibilities clearly mapped out in advance.

Application Rationalization: Agency IT portfolio managers also need to understand what applications can be moved to the cloud. Fortunately, CIOs can develop their own strategic guidance on this by leveraging the GSA Application Rationalization Playbook.

By following these initial steps, and taking a page from the commercial world, which has been leveraging these innovations for many years, it is possible for government to fully break down the barriers to cloud adoption.

Makpar has deep expertise in helping agencies to migrate to the cloud, ultimately offering increased effectiveness of data health and IT systems performance, and major savings in an agency’s IT budget.

Please contact us here for more information about how help get your agency on the path to the cloud.