The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency is making significant strides toward completing its cloud migration initiative, with nearly 85 percent of its application tier already transitioned to the cloud, a senior agency tech official said.
However, CBP still faces challenges in migrating its database tier, which is only about halfway toward its target.
“We have 276 apps, about 85 percent of that is on the application tier in the cloud and about half of that on the database tier,” CBP Chief Information Officer Sanjeev Bhagowalia, said during a GovCIO webinar on April 7.
CBP’s cloud migration efforts have been underway for several years, with the agency initially launching the effort in 2019. The shift to the cloud is part of a broader strategy to consolidate and modernize IT infrastructure across its numerous data centers, an essential move for an agency of CBP’s size and scope.
Bhagowalia explained that migrating such a large and complex set of applications has posed significant challenges, but the agency continues to make steady progress toward its goal.
While progress has been substantial, the database migration has been slower, with only about 50 percent of the database tier migrated so far. Despite this, CBP remains committed to its goal of fully migrating all applications to the cloud by the end of 2025.
“On the database tier, we still need to migrate to the cloud,” he said, highlighting the importance of reaching that goal to ensure CBP can provide its agents “the information and services they need anytime and anywhere.”
As CBP continues to evolve its technological landscape, the cloud migration and the adoption of advanced technologies like AI are expected to play a critical role in supporting the agency’s mission and ensuring the success of its modernization efforts.
Bhagowalia explained that CBP is trying to incorporate cutting edge technology into its efforts “so at the end of the day … we get that information to the front line of our men and women.”
He highlighted generative AI as one of those new capabilities that will help CBP “stay with and maybe ahead” of its cloud efforts.
“We can get that mission done faster, better and more importantly, more securely for our agents and officers,” Bhagowalia said.