Why the Federal Cloud Ecosystem Will Remain Hybrid

When it comes to IT, government agencies often take a page from the private sector, and according to the 2020 State of the Cloud report, 87% of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy.[i] While hybrid was frequently viewed as an interim step on the way to cloud, that is no longer the case. Some workloads may always need to remain on-premises for regulatory, security, performance or cost reasons, although these limitations are beginning to decrease. As a case in point, major public cloud service providers (CSPs) such as AWS, Microsoft and Google have invested in delivering cloud services on premises through Outposts, Stack and Anthos respectively. These services provide a common workload deployment process for both on-premises and cloud-based environments.[ii]

The U.S. Federal government has followed a similar path with Cloud Smart which superseded Cloud First as the federal cloud computing strategy in 2019. Now federal agencies have more options for deploying hybrid cloud infrastructure, including numerous FedRAMP cloud services, blueprints for deploying shared and unique private clouds and an endless combination of each. Other developments that continue to indicate strong federal commitment to hybrid multi-cloud include:[iii]