As Federal agencies modernize infrastructure and seek the benefits that cloud environments offer, a hybrid multi-cloud approach can balance flexibility with control, allowing agencies to streamline operations while managing complexity and costs. MeriTalk recently sat down with David Smith, Senior Director, Americas Public Sector, and Gary Pentecost, Senior Director Public Sector Account Technical Strategy, from Citrix, which provides mission-critical software solutions, to discuss what is needed to enable hybrid multi-cloud in the Federal environment.
MeriTalk: What are the biggest challenges for agencies as they manage on-premises and multi-cloud environments?
Pentecost: One of the bigger challenges I see is with initiatives or environments that span multiple organizations. Processes across organizations may not be aligned, and goals may not be shared. If departments are given a directive but don’t fully understand the reasons behind it or the end goals, they’re probably not going to be aligned on how to proceed. This leads to fragmented implementation and operational friction. Understanding the “why” is critical.
Smith: Organizations may utilize different tools depending on if a service is deployed on-premises versus in a cloud. This creates a forced integration of tools that were never meant to work together which results in increased complexity and potential gaps in visibility and security.
Security fragmentation poses a major challenge in cloud environments, as departments often have different approaches to security and access control. This fragmentation is exacerbated by siloed information, preventing comprehensive visibility across environments. Organizations need consistent visibility into operations – from application performance to user activity – across various data centers and clouds.
MeriTalk: In a hybrid multi-cloud environment, how can agencies ensure access and operational consistency with workloads both on premises and in the cloud?
Smith: Utilizing technologies like virtualization and containerization to abstract the workload from the underlying infrastructure gives agencies the flexibility to move workloads to achieve better performance, ramp up capacity, or gain cost efficiencies between on-premises environments and different cloud providers. Secure and reliable network connectivity between on-premises data centers, cloud platforms, and end users is also important for workload portability.
Success in hybrid multi-cloud environments also demands a cloud-agnostic platform that avoids vendor lock-in while providing unified management across all environments. To ensure access and operational consistency across on-premises and cloud, the platform should provide centralized management, integrated application and data control, access management, a seamless user experience, and complete visibility and security across all environments.
MeriTalk: How can agencies ensure consistent security policies and access controls are applied across their hybrid multi-cloud environments, even as workloads and data are distributed across different cloud platforms?
Pentecost: Agencies have shifted from perimeter security to a holistic cloud security strategy that includes continuous monitoring, web application firewalls, API protection, bot identification and management, data protection and encryption, zero trust, endpoint management, and network monitoring. With this shift in strategy, automation and orchestration of security policies is critical.
There’s a reason why IT spend on security continues to increase. This is no easy task. But a platform that provides centralized management and visibility helps security teams to consistently implement security policies, including identity and access management, across environments from one location.
MeriTalk: What about the end-user experience?
Smith: Maintaining a high quality end user experience is a must. In hybrid cloud environments, applications live in a lot of different places, and for end users, knowing where to go and access an application can be a challenge. Organizations need a simplified access platform to provide easy and secure access to applications and data, regardless of where the application lives – or the user is located.
Another important building block is observability into application performance and user activity, for both experience and security reasons. It is important that government agencies implement tools that provide the proper level of visibility to maintain a quality end user experience while maintaining security.
Pentecost: The Citrix platform provides agencies with the building blocks to securely deliver secure applications across systems, ensuring seamless access and optimized user and administrative experiences, while maintaining security and compliance across infrastructures. In addition, our FedRAMP-compliant services support various deployment scenarios, from public and private clouds to classified environments.
MeriTalk: What are some of the shared characteristics and best practices among organizations that you’ve worked with that have effectively implemented and sustained hybrid multi-cloud architectures?
Smith: Most organizations that have effectively taken advantage of hybrid multi-cloud capabilities have a clearly stated and well-defined cloud strategy that aligns with the overall mission of the agency or organization. They set ground rules to define why they’re using the cloud and they outcomes they expect, such as, cost reduction, performance, flexibility, or security.
They also implement strong governance, making sure there are processes to manage their cloud environments and the applications in those environments. In addition, they prioritize security and compliance, making sure that as technologies are implemented, they’re secure by design. And ultimately, these organizations have a strong focus on seamless delivery of services to end users, helping them to accomplish their missions.