Modern information technology has the ability to fundamentally alter how governments interact with their citizens. It can enable them to communicate with their constituents in new ways, reduce the friction of applying for permitting and benefits, and even make it easier to govern remotely when in-person meetings just aren’t possible.
Federal leaders in this—and in previous administrations—have recognized these opportunities and have worked hard to establish a foundation upon which agencies can build their digital transformation strategies. I was proud to work with many of these leaders in my previous government roles, focused on modernizing federal IT.
The COVID-19 pandemic has, for better or worse, clarified the criticality of modern government technology. As federal and state governments sent their employees home, capacity and accessibility demands quickly overwhelmed IT systems and processes. Many agencies struggled to provide services using newer digital channels. And, unfortunately, new security challenges emerged as well, particularly among agencies whose specialized “government clouds” strained under the load.
We believe there’s a better way. It starts with acknowledging that there really is no need for specialized government clouds that give the illusion of a digital fortress. In fact, these “gov clouds” have actually hindered the federal government’s ability to take full advantage of the security and full capabilities of commercial cloud environments. How did this happen?
Government Clouds vs. Commercial Clouds
To back up a bit, the construct of a government cloud was introduced in 2013, following the introduction of FedRAMP. To meet new FedRAMP security requirements, many cloud providers built separate environments to run government workloads. While this enabled them to more easily achiev ..
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