The US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has successfully migrated around 60 percent of its workloads into the cloud.
While significant progress has been made, CIO Charlie Armstrong is continuing to push forward with the migration, reports Federal News Network.
According to Amstrong, FEMA, which coordinates the response to domestic disasters in the US, is eventually aiming to get everything out of its data center so that it can be decommissioned and shut down.
“In addition to that, in the September or October timeframe, we kicked off a small re-hosting effort, that’s actually pulling the covers back on some of these systems that are not planned to be modernized for a while, and maybe doing some database re-platforming, making them ready to be what we call cloud natives so that we can really leverage the value of cloud and be able to scale up and scale down as we need to,” said Armstrong.
The remainder of the migration process is expected to really kick off over the next year, after what Armstrong describes as a "slow start."
"Mainly that was the complexity around the networking between our existing data center and our connections into the cloud service providers that we’re using," he said. "It took us some time to kind of make sure that we had the latency issues worked out so that we had the performance that was required in order to keep those as viable applications."
For the remaining 40 percent of applications, some will need to be re-platformed, including the FEMA training system. Current goals will see FEMA re-platforming or refactoring five or six systems in 2024.
The applications that would be too expensive to replatform are still being discussed, but will eventually have to shut down regardless.
Armstrong counts among FEMA's successes: the moving of 19 grant applications to the new FEMA Grants Outcomes platform with plans to move 20 more this month, and the migration of FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program, both of which have been fully operational in the cloud since March 2024.
The current task is FEMA's financial systems modernization effort, something which has been a challenge for the whole Homeland Security Department.
Armstrong cites cloud migration as providing better scalability and flexibility but doesn't predict much in terms of finances.
"I don’t anticipate that there’s going to be some huge cost savings," he explained. "At the end of the day, we do get to avoid some re-capitalization of the equipment that’s in the facility today. The way I see it, we’re going to get to more resilient data centers and be able to do things like geographic diversity, and have multiple points of entry through the departmental new cap program."
Several other federal agencies have announced cloud migrations over the last few years, including the US Army, Immigration and Customs, Homeland Security, and the Federal Aviation Administration among others.
