Jumpstarting cloud adoption
Summary
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) Chief Information Officer (CIO) needed help undertaking a broad cloud transformation initiative, so a specialized team of site reliability engineers was provided 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 a 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