Breaking the Traditional Federal Cloud Mold: ViON’s Agile Cloud Platform (ACP) with vCloud Suite

Cloud isn’t a new concept for government.  Approximately 8.5 percent – or roughly $7 billion – of the government’s IT spending goes to provisioned services like cloud[1] today.

But, even greater opportunity for savings is ahead, as agencies focus hard on legacy migration. The costs associated with maintaining outdated infrastructure have reached the impossible point. OMB’s legacy systems report, out last month, found many agencies use outdated, unsupported software languages and hardware parts.

Agencies reported using systems that have components that in some cases, are 50+ years old.

Cloud offers a migration opportunity, but navigating the skies isn’t easy.  Agencies are challenged with forecasting and managing cloud budgets, and with ensuring that data is protected and secure.

Protecting constituent data is top priority as agencies consider cloud models, and keeping systems current is key.  Cloud enables more frequent updates, improves overall efficiency, and helps agencies make the shift to using OpEx vs. CapEx dollars.

The ViON’s Agile Cloud Platform (ACP) with vCloud Suite software (private cloud, with JAB-based FedRAMP Provisional Authorization), for example, enables agencies to store data locally behind their firewall, access both on- and off-premises, and reduce waste by paying only for the capacity they use – addressing budget and data protection concerns.

Operating under a unique “Pay-as-you-Consume” billing model, ACP provides scalable, customized capacity to migrate and manage sensitive data.

Importantly, the implementation is modular.  IT teams select and implement what they need, adding services into their portfolio as their mission evolves, and as they build success with initial cloud service offerings.

The ACP with vCloud Suite also enables Federal IT teams to:

• Monitor the environment and perform self-healing tasks based on well-defined scripts
• Connect to public cloud providers and services for a hybrid cloud design, should they choose to modify

As an enterprise-class solution, the vCloud Suite comes with a vSphere hypervisor, which creates the foundation for add-on components such as vCenter Server, vCloud Automation Center, vRealize Operations Manager, and vRealize Business.

These add-on components help to make the most of the cloud offering and scale to meet changing agency workloads.

For example, with the vRealize Automation Center, agencies create and present a service catalog with available IT resources to automate processes, reduce provisioning time required by the IT team and freeing resources to work on strategic projects.

ViON’s cloud offerings provide more control with a modular migration path – that’s the real silver lining.

Learn more about flexible IT – and find out how your agency can benefit from IT on-demand.

This blog post was originally published here. 

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2016/assets/ap_17_it.pdf