Agencies have increased their cloud services spending by 60 percent through the General Services Administration’s governmentwide acquisition contracts in the last five years and Allen Hill, deputy assistant commissioner for category management at GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said the rise could be attributed to the shift to remote work environment, Federal News Network reported Friday.
“A lot of the drivers had to do with the enterprise type services that the cloud offers. For example, email-as-a-service and collaboration tools-as-a-service,” Hill told FNN in an interview.
“Why? Because we went to a remote environment that demand to have individual staff work at their homes and where they were at was so important. That change in direction for the agencies, rapidly scaling up to what was necessary was very important,” he added.
Although agencies continue to spend on cloud services, Hill said these organizations have become more focused on business applications as they take a slower approach to ensure that they have the right skillsets and infrastructure in place before making the transition.
“It has slowed down this year. That’s really because of the scalability of the business applications and taking that very detailed look of what needs to occur for that transition to occur,” he said.
Hill, who will join the Federal Communications Commission in August to serve as chief information officer, also discussed the agencies’ interest in as-a-service framework or managed services as they adopt 5G and implement software-defined networks.
