Agencies benefit when they move their applications to commercial clouds. If nothing else, agencies free themselves from the effort and cost of hardware planning, acquisition and maintenance. But remote hosting doesn’t absolve federal IT staffs from the burden of patching and updating applications. Those tasks remain regardless of where an application resides.
Andrew Churchill, vice president for federal at Qlik, says even greater benefits accrue when agencies move software as a service (SaaS) applications certified by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP).
Speaking specifically of data analytics applications, the time and effort agencies must spend on maintenance means they can have less time available for analytics and strategic thinking, Churchill said during a session at Federal News Network’s Industry Exchange: Data.