The Small Business Administration (SBA) was tasked with processing more than $1 trillion in grants and loans for small enterprises during the COVID-19 pandemic and Sanjay Gupta, chief technology officer at SBA, discussed how a cloud-based foundation established in 2018 as part of the agency’s modernization strategy enabled SBA to manage such an increase in workload, Nextgov reported Friday.
Gupta mentioned how the cloud foundation helped SBA to rapidly scale up and accommodate users from anywhere.
“In terms of call centers, using services like [artificial intelligence] or machine learning, we have increasingly adopted more of those services from a cloud-based offering for the simple reason that it allows us to scale up quickly, but more importantly, it allows to initiate those services—turn those services on—very quickly,” Gupta said.
“We don’t have to go through the typical acquisition life cycles of buying new hardware, configuring it and going through the whole acquisition process. Having a cloud foundation allows us to do that,” he added.
