For the past decade or so State Agencies have been working towards achieving the agility, cost savings, innovation, and scalability benefits promised by cloud experts and providers. However, the transition towards a cloud-based system has, at times, been painfully slow and inefficient. Their current systems are in desperate need of an overhaul, with many agencies having old and antiquated systems, which are no longer fit for purpose.

As with many industries, State Agencies have been tested by the Covid-19 pandemic, and have had to quickly adopt new working systems after failings were identified. Human resources systems in particular, were found to be lacking. A simple fix was impossible, in this context, as the existing systems were so antiquated that many end of life (EOL) components were missing the skilled developers necessary to maintain and update the systems.

Instead, agencies are resorting to completely re-platforming their systems and the migrating to hybrid cloud is the ideal solution. Many government organizations use cloud technology as the basis and foundation of their efforts to modernize their technology infrastructure and provide citizens with rapid and efficient delivery of services.

Government officials are looking to speed up delivery of business solutions, reduce operational costs and maintenance requirements, while adding a layer of resiliency against disasters and service outages.

There are three key considerations for hybrid cloud migration, which apply specifically to State Agencies:

1.       How much of your legacy application can be repurposed for the cloud?

Understanding the difference between traditional legacy application architectures and hybrid cloud platforms is of paramount importance when looking to migrate. Nobody wants to have to start completely from scratch, therefore, preserving parts of your legacy application is a great place to start.

IBM defines “Lift and shift,” also known as “rehosting,” as the process of migrating an exact copy of an application or workload (and its data store and operating system) from one IT environment to another—usually from on-premises to public or private cloud. There is no change to application architecture and little or no change to application code, the lift and shift strategy enables a faster, less labor-intensive and (initially) less-costly migration compared to other processes.

Hybrid cloud tools like OpenShift offer agencies the ability to either “lift and shift” applications into the cloud or “refactor” applications to run on the cloud, allowing agencies to preserve certain valuable functionality of the app while offering a new platform to scale it. An additional advantage of this system is that it offers the ability for users to not have to be retrained on a new platform, saving costs on training, enablement and the inefficiency that comes with learning something new.

2.       How can you offer a true digital platform?

Migration to a true hybrid cloud provides organizations with the ability to work across all environments—private, public or on-premise—and in a manner that does not require separate teams for each platform because of consistency in delivering both the underlying infrastructure and operations. Previous agency applications use old, inefficient, and proprietary API and EDI interfaces. Interagency integration for data exchange is siloed, inefficient, and custom. Additionally, there is currently no real way to offer the public an “Open Data” platform due to the old interfaces that do not use modern cloud native API functionality.

Hybrid cloud is a digital foundation that can act as a springboard for innovative applications and services that meet the needs of citizens and without users compromising on cost efficiency or security. The use of the hybrid cloud enables public sector organizations to manage the balance between needing the right environments to transform, without the challenges of migrating everything to the cloud right away.

This can be achieved by using Red Hat 3Scale. This system enables agencies to build a single common interface, set API access points across all applications, and offers a self-service portal for 3rd parties (both agencies or public) to gain access. Additionally, 3Scale security controls allow agencies to differentiate permissions, granting them access to private data and granting the public access to public data.

3.       How can you provide better reporting?

Accurate reporting is a large issue that affects many State Agencies who have yet to migrate to a cloud-based system.  Many agency applications were custom built ten or more years ago and are a hodgepodge of siloed systems with siloed reporting, which are not fit for purpose. Obtaining any kind of insight from an outdated system of this kind typically requires an additional team of analysts to import and crunch data from multiple systems - often in spreadsheets and/or in a 3rd party washboarding tool - to get accurate reporting.

LaunchBI by Stone Door Group is a solution to this issue as it provides a turnkey hybrid cloud reporting solution that leverages SAP and RHEL to aggregate data from multiple systems into a single dashboard. This system imports data from multiple siloed reporting systems in real time and creates a single source of truth dashboard that enables users to get a single view into the agency. This dashboard is available desktop standalone, mobile, or embedded in existing applications. Enabling fast and concise access to key data.

Conclusion

If you are trying to decide on the best option for your agency, we offer solutions to all three of these issues. Schedule some then click here to schedule one of our Ask The Expert℠ sessions for more information. Our consultants will walk you through a fully integrated example state agency application demo of OpenShift, 3Scale, and our own LaunchBI solution (powered by Red Hat and SAP). Please contact us today to schedule a Project Caesar demo.

About the Author

Michael Fay is a 20+ year enterprise software sales professional and SLED Account Manager for Stone Door Group. Michael helps agencies get their digital transformation projects off the ground and services as a mentor and trusted advisor through the process. To talk to Michael about how Stone Door Group can accelerate your agency’s application modernization projects, drop him a line at letsdothis@stonedoorgroup.com

Technical Lead

Renee Briggs is a senior BI systems administrator for LaunchWorks.com, a Stone Door Group Company. Stone Door Group specializes in DevOps based digital transformation of the enterprise.

About Stone Door Group

Stone Door Group® is a Red Hat Advanced Build partner that modernizes state, local government and educational IT systems through skilled DevOps and Hybrid Cloud professional services. Through exceptional project management and certified technical consultants, we deploy cloud native solutions that transform agency applications into next generation digital platforms.