Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, agencies like the Small Business Administration (SBA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) have made the telework transition much easier for their personnel because of cloud-based systems.
Speaking during the Putting Cloud Smart into Practice webinar today, Director for Governance and Enterprise Management Services at NRC John Moses talked about cloud being one of the agency’s critical functions and that NRC started pandemic planning back in mid-February.
“We started thinking through what it would take to shift the entire agency to telework,” Moses said, citing that NRC was fortunate enough to also have recent modernizations such as portable desktops to make the transition smoother.
“Once we shifted to full time telework we went up to 50,000 Skype sessions, audio and video per week. We more than doubled our bandwidth in the first three days, and we’re probably approaching just about tripling it right now,” Moses said of NRC’s telework operations.
For SBA, cloud has allowed the agency to survive through telework, according to CTO Sanjay Gupta. An increase in heavy traffic for SBA’s website, he says, was supported by the agency’s ability to scale up.
“The president had tweeted sba.gov in one of his tweets and our volume of traffic – within an hour – went up about a thousand-fold,” Gupta said. “And so you can imagine that had we not been in the cloud, I don’t think we’d be able to sustain the exponential growth that would happen within minutes of the tweet coming out.”
