From left to right: BSA Senior Director, IT Modernization and Procurement Jessica Salmoiraghi; SAP Vice President, Business Technology Platform Center of Excellence David Maloney; Microsoft Senior Cloud Solution Architect Richard Hollister; and Oracle Global Vice President, Defense and Intelligence Mark Andress.
Multi-cloud technologies that are already widely used by the private sector stand to accelerate innovation and competition if deployed across the US government, a series of software industry experts told a crowd on Capitol Hill.
BSA | The Software Alliance released its first-ever US procurement agenda this week, which was highlighted by a call for the US government to adopt multi-cloud solutions across federal agencies. Multi-cloud refers to utilizing multiple cloud service providers’ compute, AI, and infrastructure services, rather than one single provider.
BSA Senior Director, IT Modernization and Procurement Jessica Salmoiraghi moderated a panel of BSA member company representatives who discussed the importance of security in all cloud infrastructures. She was joined by SAP Vice President, Business Technology Platform Center of Excellence Dave Maloney; Microsoft Senior Cloud Solution Architect Richard Hollister; and Oracle Global Vice President, Defense and Intelligence Mark Andress.
A successful multi-cloud implementation is achieved through workforce development and small investments that are reliable and scalable for different customers, Maloney told the crowd. The result is that customers, including the government, spend more time analyzing data rather than moving data, enabling them to innovate and identify solutions more quickly.
“I think that is probably representative of the future in multi-cloud, is this closely coupled, low latency, ease of use for the CIOs of the world that just want to be able to spin up the best innovation across whoever is bringing that technology in a combination of choices,” said Andress describing how Oracle and Microsoft’s Azure work together to enhance customers’ experiences.
Panelists illustrated how multi-cloud solutions allow federal agencies and other companies to leverage multiple cloud service providers to compute and use other capabilities such as artificial intelligence (AI) integrations to aggregate large types of data.
The advantages of using multi-cloud solutions include widespread cybersecurity risk mitigation.
Hollister described how Microsoft tracks trillions of cyber signals every day across all their products, allowing them to quickly push out patches if need be.
“Being part of a multi-cloud environment, whether that’s Salesforce or Workday or SAP or whoever, you’re going to get a very high level of security that we give to all of our customers,” Maloney.
Multi-cloud solutions can leverage technologies such as AI, 5G, edge computing, quantum, and more to allow government full access to data across agencies. Hollister said that companies are working toward incorporating these capabilities with one another to achieve the best results.
The panelists emphasized how the private sector has already incorporated and benefited from multi-cloud services. BSA will continue to encourage lawmakers to consider multi-cloud solutions for all federal government agencies to provide flexibility and competition between cloud service providers and federal agencies while strengthening cyber defenses and native cloud security.
Read BSA’s Procurement Agenda: Better Purchasing for US Government IT Transformation.
