When it comes to the idea of cloud-first — or any headlong rush toward commercial cloud computing — Bob Venero offers three words: Not so fast.
“We have all experienced outages, downtime, data loss and data leaks,” said President and CEO of Future Tech Enterprise. “A lot of that is cloud-related.”
On Federal News Network Industry Cloud Exchange 2023, “A lot of organizations have taken a cloud-first mentality without taking a step back and considering the risk versus reward,” Venero noted.
Future Tech, which Venero founded 27 years ago, recommends federal agencies commit to a hybrid approach, maintaining and modernizing their data centers as alternatives to commercial clouds.
Choosing the best location for a particular workload and its associated data involves evaluating what would happen if that data was compromised or lost, he said.
“What is your organization's minimum impact?” Venero said. “Then make that decision to bring that data into the cloud.”
He also advised agencies to consider throughput when moving workloads to the cloud and calculate the cost in terms of labor if the cloud experiences an outage.
Weigh all risks between the cloud and the front
Security is one of the big selling propositions of commercial cloud service providers (CSPs). “They're secure to the level they can get. But you don't have the proper walls around them,” Venero said. “You have physical security. You have structural security. You've got data security. Each of these brings with it its own inherent risks.
Telecommunications providers face the same risks from disgruntled employees as other organizations. In addition, as high targets, telecom service providers are naturally attractive to hackers. “You've got bad actors, right? This targets the big cloud providers versus individual small businesses. That's another risk you have to take a look at,” he said.
Another consideration is cost. The original motivation behind the federal push toward cloud computing had to do with the cost of maintaining government data centers, Venero said.
“Cloud-first wasn't always about security and protection,” he said. “It was about reducing your footprint in the data center, reducing the number of employees supporting those applications and that data.”
But it did not work that way in all cases.
“What they learned by moving data back and forth is that cost with the cloud doesn't necessarily mean lower,” Venero said. “So we are very aggressive in taking a hybrid approach.”
The hybrid approach means rethinking and modernizing data centers so that their operation is less capital-intensive than in the past, Venero said.
Moving from a CapEx model to an OpEx model
“Organizations are really looking to move from capex, capex, spend to opex, opex, spend, and you can create an OpEx environment in the data center,” he said. Adoption of technologies including networking and storage requires software knowledge, virtualization and computer-as-a-service.
With PCaaS, “there is still an inherent risk in having a thin client device delivered via the cloud,” Venero said. “If I can give you this standard device, but you pay for it in a consumption-based model, I can eliminate your risk.” He added that dense clients allow people to remain at least partially productive during network outages.
In Future Tech's business model, it works with major federal systems integrators, who themselves help agencies distill the complexities of multi-cloud deployments, Venero said.
“We work with them a lot to make sure that the environment they provide is the most secure, risk-averse and has the best uptime potential, as well as providing the ability to use CapEx and OpEx Dollars to be able to pay that to agencies as well.”
To discover more cloud tips and insights, visit the Industry Exchange Cloud 2024 event page.
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