Page 64 - Cyber Defense eMagazine - December 2017

US AGENCY SECURITY DOUBTS HINDER MOVE TO HYBRID

CLOUD

For the past seven years, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget has been pushing

Federal agencies to move much of their computing workloads to the cloud. And yet,

progress has been slow, with only about $2 billion of the Federal government’s $80
billion in annual IT spending going to cloud services as of 2016.

Years after OMB began its cloud push, Federal agencies still face significant challenges
to adoption, with security identified as one of the main issues holding back cloud

adoption. In fact, the number one concern of Federal IT managers is how to expand

their security measures and policies to cover the cloud, according to a recent survey by
MeriTalk.

In the meantime, pressure on agencies to move to the cloud isn’t going away. The U.S.

Department of Homeland Security’s new Continuous Diagnostics and
Mitigation cybersecurity program is pushing small agencies to use cloud-based security

tools. Cloud security doesn’t get the highest marks from the Federal IT managers who
responded to the MeriTalk survey, sponsored by Fortinet. A minority of them rate their

security as excellent in cloud environments; only 35 percent for the private cloud; 21

percent for the public cloud; and 27 percent when moving between physical and virtual
environments in a hybrid cloud arrangement.

Even so, many of the survey respondents see a mix of physical infrastructure and cloud

computing in their future. The ideal mix, they said, includes 39 percent physical servers
and 61 percent cloud.

But even as Federal IT managers seek to deploy the hybrid cloud, they feel unprepared,

with security. Control and compliance are again coming to the forefront. A big part of
the cloud adoption woes is the complexity of Federal IT environments. Eighty-five

percent of the surveyed Federal IT managers described their current infrastructure as

64 Cyber Defense eMagazine – December 2017 Edition
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