Guy Cavallo, deputy chief information officer of the Small Business Administration, told Federal News Network in an interview published Thursday about SBA’s cloud migration experience as part of the implementation of the continuous diagnostics and mitigation program.
Cavallo discussed how he and Maria Roat, CIO of SBA and a 2020 Wash100 award winner, advanced efforts to self-fund the cloud transition by turning off contracts for on-premise architecture, including hardware maintenance support contracts for servers, in order to generate savings.
“And then once we were in the cloud, the cybersecurity capabilities just kept taking off every week” he said. “We saw enhancements and that just reinforced that we were headed on the right path.”
Cavallo also discussed the cloud’s advantage over on-premise architecture when it comes to handling large volumes of data.
“One problem with the on-premise architecture is the amount of data that every device generates,” Cavallo said. “It’s just a tremendous amount of data that would require an expensive hardware on-premise to deal with. And we’d constantly be buying more disk space, where, with the cloud, we’re able to just keep expanding our usage and pay a fraction of the cost of owning the hardware ourselves.”
