Jumpstarting cloud adoption
Summary
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Chief Information Officer (CIO) needed help undertaking a broad cloud transformation initiative, so we provided a specialized team of site reliability engineers to jumpstart the transition.
The challenge
The TSA’s CIO organization faced several issues associated with running its on-premise IT infrastructure (such as high operating costs), which were going to be further compounded by imminent budget cuts. The cloud presented a way out, but the organization lacked in-depth experience operating in this new way.
The solution
To address this challenge, Chris Cairns and Shashank Khandelwal, as members of 18F, designed an approach to kickstart the organization’s adoption of a cloud-based operating model. This involved pairing TSA with an expert team of site reliability engineers who:
- Introduced an agile-based approach to migrating the portfolio of applications over a series of phases
- Migrated two low-risk applications within a few months to give leadership immediate insight into what changes needed to be made to the organization’s structure, culture, talent mix, practices, tooling, and vendor ecosystem
- Showcased the value of combining cloud services with DevSecOps practices, such as infrastructure as code
- Imparted cloud and DevOps competencies through training, coaching, and hiring support
The results
- Jumpstarted movement to the cloud, which is projected to save tens of millions of dollars to meet impending budget reductions
- Inspired shift toward modern practices such as lean-agile and DevOps