Cloud Migration Factors to Consider For Public Sector Organizations

MCP's informational podcast series features the firm’s subject-matter experts and other industry leaders exploring a wide range of timely topics pertaining to mission-critical communications.

In this episode of the Mission Critical Partners Podcast Network, we are discussing cloud migration factors to consider for public sector organizations. We are joined by three Mission Critical Partners, Eric Caddy, Vice President and Director of Network and 911 Services, Jamie Sullivan, Senior Technical Specialist, and Gary Pulford, Director of Product Management.

• Eric Caddy, Senior Project Manager, Eric is a PMP with extensive experience managing statewide and regional NG911 projects, including strategic planning, budget planning, stakeholder engagement, consensus building and implementation oversight. Eric brings more than 20 years of emergency communications experience to MCP, leading technical and operational public safety projects for the military, state and local governments. Eric has the ability to enable communications between diverse stakeholders with competing priorities to achieve project success for clients. He has served numerous California agencies, including the State of Nebraska, the State of California, the State of Arizona, the City and County of San Francisco, the State of California, The El Paso–Teller County 911 Authority, and the San Diego Urban area Security Initiative (UASI).
• Jamie Sulliva, Senior Technology Specialist, Jamie has years of project management experience leading technical teams that develop, integrate, and deploy complex computing solutions. He thoroughly understands the technologies serving today’s businesses, public safety agencies, and consumers (network, mobile, messaging, etc.). In addition, Jamie has managed infrastructure buildout projects supporting PSAP cutover plans to ensure functionality, redundancy, and security. He is a strategic thinker and practical decision-maker.
• Gary Pulford, Director of Product Management, Gary has extensive senior-level experience in sales, business development and marketing. His skills include leading sales team strategies to support state and local governments and guiding the team by removing roadblocks, leading initiatives and overseeing the entire sales cycle. He creates a vision and utilizes his skills of collaboration to achieve successful outcomes. In addition, Gary has consulted with state and local agencies on broadband expansion for Smart City initiatives.
• The episode is moderated by Glenn Bischoff, MCP content specialist and former editor of Urgent Communications and Fire Chief magazines.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Mission Critical Partners Podcast Network. Today, we are discussing with industry thought leaders how public sector organizations are evolving and how the transformation will result in improved outcomes in the communities they serve. The MCP Podcast Network work is hosted by former journalist and current MCP Content Specialist Glenn Bischoff. Here's Glenn Bischoff.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Greetings, and welcome to the MCP Podcast Network. I'm Glenn Bischoff, MCP's Content Specialist, and it's my joy to welcome you to this session where we're going to be discussing cloud migration factors to consider for public sector organizations. I'm joined by three colleagues from MCP, Eric Caddy, Vice President and Director of Network and 911 Services. Jamie Sullivan, Senior Technical Specialist. And last but not least Gary Pulford, Director of Product Management. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us, and we're really looking forward to your insights. We'll jump right into the topic questions, and Eric, I'm going to come to you first. The first one, the first question, reads like this. On a high level, why should public sector organizations consider moving to the cloud?

Eric Caddy:

All right, thank you, Glenn. You know, when you think about a transition or a migration to the cloud, I think there's, there's so many benefits that can be realized by public safety, and I'll touch on a few. I'm sure my colleagues will have others. So, I'll start with probably first and foremost, depending on your level of expertise of information technology inside of your agency. You're really shifting that, that responsibility of the maintenance and upkeep of hardware and applications away from your organization. So, you can focus on your mission and putting it into a public cloud provider, like an AWS or an Azure or Google public cloud right, and these are experts who deal with the uptime and upkeep of hardware and applications on a regular basis. So, you're really kind of transferring that expertise to a provider.

I think a couple of other things to think about is the ease of application deployment from a cloud platform. So, like your upgrades and your new installs, they go much quicker, they're a little more seamless, they're kind of occurring behind the scenes. And then, when you have downtime, when you have a catastrophic event, oftentimes we think of that in public safety when I lose my CAD system, or I lose my call-handling platform. You know, I'm waiting around. Perhaps I've got to roll call somewhere else because I've got to wait for the techs to come out. And you kind of in a properly architected solution, you see some risks like that get mitigated cause maybe you've got a multi-zone deployment. So, where you may experience a failure in one location, you have another area that can pick up the slack. There's many others. I'll let my colleagues speak as well.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

All right, thanks, Eric. That's a great start to the conversation. Gary, what are your thoughts? Why do you think public sector organizations should be thinking about moving to the cloud?

Gary Pulford:

Well, first and foremost, I believe most of your vendor application providers are actually on a strategy to migrate their applications into cloud. So, you're going to be forced into that support of that model over time as they're making that migration. But to Eric's point, there's a lot of security access, availability, disaster recovery capabilities that are benefit from by moving more and more applications and workloads to the cloud.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

And especially in the area of information technology, that might not be the strongest suit of a public sector organization, but it certainly is for the cloud providers, right?

Gary Pulford:

Correct.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

All right, Jamie, what are your thoughts?

Jamie Sullivan:

Yeah, along the same lines outsourcing that risk of security. If you're in an area where resources that have that skillset aren't as available as they might be in big metropolitan areas, for example, then this is a solution for you. You know it leaves you less responsibility, less things to think about. You can focus on the sort of more, you know less technical things like physical security, right, and let the others deal with the rest.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

All right. Thanks to all of you for those perspectives. Gary, I'm going to come to you first for the next question, which reads like this, what specific factors should public sector organizations consider before migrating to the cloud and of these factors, which are the most important and why?

Gary Pulford:

So, I think the most important factor if your plan is to move to the cloud and do a digital transformation or migration to you know a cloud environment is having a plan, having a strategy on what you're going to move, how you're going to move it, you know, what your objectives are, what you're trying to achieve is going to give you a roadmap of how to implement you know any type of migration to the cloud.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Jamie, what do you think?

Jamie Sullivan:

I think you know resourcing. Do you have technical staff available? Like we just said in your area? What's your level of comfort of losing control of systems? You know that sort of thing. What are your DR plans if your cloud service goes down isn't available anymore? You know, things you would think about, you know the same things you would think about if the equipment's in their back-office your backroom there, but yeah, those are the top three, I think for me.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Eric.

Eric Caddy:

Yeah. I think just assessing your own understanding and knowledge, right. Gary talks about a plan, and that's great, and you definitely, that's highly recommended to start there. But understanding kind of what applications do you have today that you're using in your deployment? Understanding of those applications are capable of moving to the cloud and really gaining knowledge of the different cloud providers and some of their strengths and weaknesses, I think is a good baseline to start. So, you understand, based on those strengths and weaknesses, perhaps by cloud provider what makes the most sense for your organization.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Jamie Sullivan:

I would say integration with the systems that aren't migrating into the cloud, the systems that you maintain control of in your backroom. There may be some issues with that, or at least complexity added complexity with that. And perhaps you may have rules where you need local presence of your data. It's not something that's allowed to be stored in the data center, in a different state. It's possible; it occurs in some places, some regions of the US.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

What are you? You mentioned complexities? Can you provide a little bit more visibility into what that means? What are some of the complexities, why do they exist?

Jamie Sullivan:

Yeah, I just mean if you, in on a typical, let's say a typical 911 environment, you've got an extra network delivering a call to you, you've got your call-handling system, you've got your CAD systems, you've got recording systems. If you put, say, one of them into the cloud [inaudible], that's all I mean is that the routing of that, those data packets between all of those systems could become complex.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Right, right. That makes sense.

Jamie Sullivan:

Not that it can't be done, it's just. It's a complexity that needs to be considered.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Right. That makes a lot of sense. Eric, what do you think?

Eric Caddy:

Yeah, for me, I think your data. Jamie mentioned your data to some degree, and some of the policies may be around where your data can be stored. I think one thing that public safety agencies need to be mindful of is, and this kind of goes back to that planning step that Gary mentioned originally is, you know what's your strategy around managing that data? And you know it's obviously the application provider, especially if we think about CAD, right. A lot of data in CAD, but if we start thinking about the like long-term retention requirements. And there's all kinds of different cities and counties and states that have different rules around the retention of that data for quick records requests. So, it's really important to have a strategy there for the access of that data. As Jamie pointed out, are you permitted to store that data you know in perhaps cloud environment, but then thinking even longer term, let's say today you have vendor A deployed and vendor A is using cloud provider A, and that's where all your data is at, and everything's working great.

But you know, five years down the road from now, you decide that vendor A is no longer meeting your needs. So, you move to vendor B, and vendor B is using cloud provider B different, maybe a different platform. So, what's what? Are there any constraints around that data? Can it be transitioned from one cloud provider to another? Can you still have access and retention of that? You know, at the very least, maybe you have to develop a solution that's stored that data locally for access because there's probably some type of retention rules around the data for, you know, three to five years of storage. So long-term consideration around data is something that I don't know as being thought of, you know, when we make this transition initially.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Very good. Gary, what are your thoughts?

Gary Pulford:

So, three areas I would add, expand on what Eric said, is really understanding your data privacy policies and permissions to actually share data. One thing you tend to get when you move to a cloud is a lot more data sharing and data sharing between applications. The next area is, is your application vendors themselves and how mature their cloud applications are and established. First-generation applications may not be as stable, so you're really going to want to understand your vendor side of it. And then the last is network access. Because your data centers are remote, your applications are remote. You're going to want to make sure that you have sufficient bandwidth diversity in your network, depending on how mission-critical those applications are. And that becomes a critical piece, whether you want to access through the internet via VPN or if you want to do dedicated ethernet links directly to those cloud providers themselves.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Eric Caddy:

Guess it's a very interesting aspect, Glenn. I think there is some culture, but you know, I personally think we're starting to see a shift in the mindset. I know I am, and some of the clients I've been working with over the last couple of years, I think there's, there's a little more embracing of it. You know, I think there's still some control challenges there. Like I, I want my equipment where I can see it and touch it, and I know it's there. There is a culture that is somewhat reticent sometimes, but I think when I think about the obstacle that makes that migration, Gary touched on the one that is connectivity, connectivity, connectivity. You've got to have CADS, has got to be in place, and that obstacle for some agencies may be difficult to overcome based on where they are in proximity to resources that can give them that connectivity to the cloud.

The other thing that I think is really important when we think about obstacles that exist towards a migration or transition is the, how are those applications architected? Because as a public safety agency, you are going to be looking at it from a procurement perspective, I'm procuring a solution, and you need to really be mindful of the vendors. As Gary mentioned earlier, they're in the midst of making that transition to the cloud. So, it's really important to understand where are they in that transition? How have they architected the solution? Because some of those things are going to be really hidden from you as the procuring entity. You know, they're going to provide the solution that you've asked for, but it's going to be incumbent on you to really understand, what is the design of that underneath? And is that putting you at risk in some way that you're unaware of? So, raising your awareness and knowledge there, I think, is another obstacle that we just need to be really counseling clients to understand.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Thank you, Eric. Gary, what are your thoughts regarding the more cultural obstacles that might exist?

Gary Pulford:

I think it's an educate, and part, it's an education thing. A part of its psychology, it's a change, and you know, a lot of people resist change. But the more people learn about it, and they understand it, you know, get advice, guidance from some of the cloud providers, some of application matters to really understand the environments and the pros and cons of those.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Very good. Thank you, Gary. Scott, I'm sorry. Jamie, your thoughts.

Jamie Sullivan:

I think a slow, methodical approach is a great way to overcome some of these obstacles, you know, get all the players to the table, all your vendors, talk about where you're going, the direction you're taking things, understand what their support level is. Perhaps you got to get through a couple budget cycles before you're ready to do it, that sort of thing and then implement in a methodical step-by-step way, one application at a time.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

So basically, do a lot of due diligence, and the more you do, the better you understand how the cloud works, the more comfortable you'll be with the concept.

Jamie Sullivan:

Exactly. Yep.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

All right. So, Gary, I'd like to come to you next first for this next question. What resources need to be in place at the organization to ensure a successful migration to the cloud?

Gary Pulford:

I think you're going to need a couple of functional roles. I think you're going to need an executive sponsor who can help manage and guide the budget process within and the procurement process, but you're going to need some IT technical leads, and some network engineering leads to understand what that architecture should look like, what resources you have, whether you have them internally, or if you need to go get some consulting to help you through that process.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Right, cause not every agency will have those large key resources. So, they need to consider going out to, let's say, a consultant to help them help guide them in this way.

Gary Pulford:

Well, they may have IT resources, but they may not have the cloud expertise that you need to architect it properly.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Right. OK. That makes a lot of sense. Jamie, what do you think?

Jamie Sullivan:

In terms of planning, I think Gary nailed it there. I think on the day of a migration, on the day of a cut over to a cloud. You're going to need those resources, plus an understanding of you know you're going to need folks to hold the fort and be ready for any issues that come down there while others on the side are working on this cloud migration. And then you know having executive support there locally to move the project along or to pull the plug on it if it's getting too late and you know, things aren't going well, and you need to make quick decisions, and you know come back and assess what's occurred and try to get, and you know fix it and do it right the next time.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Eric, I'd like to get your thoughts on what needs to be in place and especially like both Jamie and Gary brought up the idea of executive. I guess maybe we call this person a champion of the migration. I wanted to get your thoughts regarding the importance of that and then anything else that needs to be in place.

Eric Caddy:

Yeah, I think, as Jamie and Gary both indicated, having that champion in place. Really the champion that's empowered to make those decisions, like Jamie said, I mean when you're actually in the middle of that transition you know that individual needs to be empowered to be able to make the decision to keep pressing forward or to roll back to some of the other comments. You've got to have the right technical understanding, whether that is through your own staff or through bringing in subject matter experts to advise that champion you know in the transition is, is critical to have in place. I don't know if I have more to add.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

All right. Well, let me ask you about the whole idea of the executive leader being in a position to stop, stop the migration if it comes to that. What sort of circumstances would have to be in place for that to occur? I'm wondering.

Eric Caddy:

Yeah, I think in the middle of a transition, if you recognize, especially in, if you're transitioning an application, that's a real-time application, if you think about call handling or CAD specifically, right? Those are, those are real-time applications that are delivering a call or in the middle of a transactional process when in the form of CAD, right. With event updates, you know if you're in a situation where all of a sudden you recognize maybe perhaps your connectivity is not what you thought it was, you start to experience latency, or you are not getting events appropriately in, in the process. Then you may have to reassess if you're, if you want to push forward. And that's where I get back to having the appropriate knowledgeable team around you that can understand. You know, is that a flaw in the design? Is that just a hiccup in something? Can we keep pressing forward? So, I think that's probably the thing that comes to mind for me.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Right. Is there ever a point of no return where you just have to push on regardless?

Eric Caddy:

You know, again, it, it is public safety, and hopefully, you have, have done a very thorough job from a planning perspective. So, you would have those checkpoints in place, right? So, you should have a rollback strategy. So, in theory, you should never reach the point of no return. You know, I think, I think sometimes, as you're pressing through a transition or an upgrade, you don't want to be, you don't want to adjust any little hiccup that goes on, and you just decide nope, we need to roll back. And that's where again, it gets into having a plan, making sure you understand where you're your checkpoint are in that plan. You know, you should always have the option to roll back at any given point in the plan.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

That makes a lot of sense. OK, let's move on to the next topic question, and Jamie, I'm going to come to you first. Thinking about the cloud providers, what specific capabilities should they be offering? What are, what are the must-haves?

Jamie Sullivan:

Trustability, scalability, reliability, those things but also transparency, I think is a big one. In terms of the data, what exactly is happening in their environment? They should have dashboards or some visibility for a 911 agency to see what's going on. If, if interested, if possible, they should be offering speed. You know speed to implement is one of the biggest benefits of the cloud.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Makes a lot of sense.

Jamie Sullivan:

It might not be something necessarily. Maybe they need to be slow and methodical in how they do it, which typically they do. But certainly, speed to implement is a big driver for businesses, in particular, to go to the cloud. So, it's worth mentioning.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Perfect. No, absolutely. Eric, what do you think?

Eric Caddy:

I think when I think about the specific capabilities, Jamie obviously clearly covered the big ones here. I would add, what's their support level? What are their SLAs and support levels look like for you? And again, this gets back into the understanding of your solution. So, it's not just; you know it's you and your support, are they offering architects or engineers that, that you can get on the phone with and ask questions of, or do they have educational sessions, webinars perhaps maybe that you've got some insight with, to just help develop your own understanding of their solution. And these are things you should be asking as you're in the middle of that transition with your vendor because, you know, your vendor is going to be the one that is utilizing those services. So as the procuring entity, you know, do you have the same level of access so you can raise your understanding and knowledge in this space?

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Thanks, Eric. So, Gary, if you were planning a cloud implementation, what would you be looking for from the provider?

Gary Pulford:

So, from a public sector, public safety standpoint, you know, one of the big things you need to have as a foundation is the certifications that the cloud infrastructure itself meets the, you know, like a FedRAMP or a StateRAMP type of certification from the framework of itself. So, you have some confidence that the security aspects were designed properly, obviously, you know, compute storage on a flexible basis, maybe flexible pricing, depending on what your workloads look like, are going to be important. I'd also want to know you know be looking for the innovation of those cloud platforms themselves, of how you're going to be able to grow and innovate along with the evolution of your cloud environment.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

So, Gary, some of our viewers might not be familiar with FedRAMP and StateRAMP. So maybe let's have you talk a little bit more about them, what they are, why they exist, why they're important, how they might differ from each other.

Gary Pulford:

Yeah. So FedRAMP is basically a framework for a cloud environment, the infrastructure itself that meets the security requirements and processes and best practices in place to support federal agencies. It was put in place a while ago. The challenge of FedRAMP is you have to have a federal customer in order to give FedRAMP certification. And it's not a. It's a year-plus-long process to get certified. StateRAMP is a relatively recent evolution that's came about in the last 12, 18 months, and it is very similar, almost identical to FedRAMP, but it's geared more towards states and large municipalities where you don't, aren't required to have a federal customer or a sponsoring agency at the federal level. The state will work for that. So, it takes some of the federalness. So, if you're not a, you know a large cloud provider who has federal customers, you're an emerging cloud provider with an application service, it can be difficult for them to actually achieve FedRAMP certification. That's where StateRAMP comes in, and there's, I believe about 35 states have already on board that are supporting it.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Thank you. I appreciate that clarification. So, the next question is basically a three-parter, and Eric, I'm going to come to you first. The first part is, what steps should a public sector organization take to determine whether a cloud migration is appropriate for them?

Eric Caddy:

So, I think this really comes back down to, you know, that opening thought process we had or discussion point around having a strategy and a plan. So, you've got to understand you know just because everybody else is doing it doesn't mean your organization needs to do it. So, you need to look at you know what is your mission statement of your agency? What are you trying to achieve? And do you have the resources to do that? So again, its migration might be appropriate if it's going to enhance your capabilities, especially from an IT perspective. We've talked about that a little bit. You know, you may not have all the expertise on hand to do certain things, so it might make perfect sense, but I think that strategy in developing the plan is going to flesh out a lot of those details, and that probably results in your answer on whether it is appropriate or not for your organization.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Gary, what are your thoughts?

Gary Pulford:

Very similar to Eric, you know, understanding what types of you know applications or services or workload you want to move from you know your in-house data center to a cloud environment it's going to be in part contingent upon what those applications can't support. So, if your application vendor isn't ready to move to the cloud, or they don't have a version of it, obviously that's something that you're would be difficult to move, or you're going to have to procure a new solution that can't support it.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Jamie, what are your thoughts?

Jamie Sullivan:

Availability, I think of technical resources. And along with the other things, the other gentleman mentioned here at some point you, you identify for you, which applications are the best candidates to move to the cloud, right? It's not going to be everything, at least not initially, but having the right people around you is, is something you definitely need to do.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Makes a lot of sense. OK. So, the second part of this question is, and Gary, I'm going to come to you first. What steps should the organization take to ensure that they select the appropriate cloud environment? And there are three cloud environments, there's the native/public, there's the private cloud, and then there's the hybrid. So, Gary, maybe start by explaining just very quickly the difference between those three environments and then give us your opinion as to what an organization is and without telling us saying that here's, here's the one you should pick, but here are the things that you need to do to make sure that you pick the right one for your purposes.

Gary Pulford:

Yeah, so a public or native cloud environment is kind of a, for the most purposes, a shared environment. You get economies of scales. That's what drives the costs down on those environments. And there's really two flavors of those. There's just an enterprise public cloud environment where it's shared infrastructure, and then there is a .gov or CJIS compliant version of the public cloud, where it meets all the requirements for a government or CJIS environment. Typically, it's a FedRAMP certified platform. Private cloud is a dedicated, and it can be called private or dedicated is a dedicated cloud environment, whether it's internal to your facilities or you go through a third party that is providing all the equipment in the cloud environment and applications, but all that's dedicated to you as an individual customer, it's not shared with anybody else. And then a hybrid is some mix of the two.

So, it could be you have applications and services in your data center that aren't appropriate to move to the cloud or not enabled to the cloud mixed with workloads, applications, and environments that can't actually reside in the cloud. And it could just be as simple as you're doing DR, disaster recovery, in the cloud, versus all your applications systems in your data center itself, right? So, which one's appropriate depends on what your requirements and what your data requirements are. Are your applications able to move into a cloud? All the applications, then you can look at either an enterprise or.gov environment that really comes down to the data requirements and restrictions of those applications. I would typically, you're going to see at least in the early stages, some type of hybrid, you're going to migrate slowly one application initially, as you're starting that, that you know digital transformation process with your strategy and plan, and whether you get everything into the cloud or not is going to be an issue of what your environment looks like and what your requirements are.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Right. And so, the step to take would be a holistic assessment of your infrastructure, your applications and everything that you need them to do. So, you can make these decisions.

Gary Pulford:

Yeah. And a big piece of, we mentioned before, is connectivity. You know, do you have access, the appropriate access to those clouds to give you the diversity and resiliency you're going to need in those environments since it is typically mission-critical applications that you're talking about.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Right. So, Jamie, what do you think? What do you think are the specific steps that an organization needs to take in order to make the best decision regarding which cloud environment to select?

Jamie Sullivan:

Well, for the most part, you're probably not; you're probably not making the cloud provider decision yourself, right? You probably have a third-party vendor. Whether it's a call handling system, CAD, or what have you that uses one of the cloud providers, you know Google, Microsoft, or Amazon behind it. So, it's possible that, that you may decide to go talk to a handful of cloud CAD providers, and they're all using AWS. Well, there's that decision you don't really, that's, it's going to be AWS that you go with, but either way, you're going to need to hear the sales pitches. Talk to them, see what they have for technology, what their, you know, certifications are? Are they following standards? Do some research, get some help from consultants, if necessary, hear the sales pitches, dig into those responses, request solid support SLAs and that kind of thing.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Very good. Eric, your final thoughts?

Eric Caddy:

Yeah. I think Gary and Jamie have covered the gamut here, so I don't know that I have anything else to add, really.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Jamie Sullivan:

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And you need to ensure they're following standards. Another thing we've talked about several times here already in NextGen 911, you can't go rogue. You can't go with vendors that are doing their own thing. NENA does what they do for a reason. We all follow the standards. We all evolve together. So yeah, just you know, due diligence, understanding what those products are, those services, what the support is, how it's architected, their certifications, that sort of thing. If you follow those lines, you are; you should be in good hands.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

So, are the cloud providers pretty open to that sort of thing? I mean, are they willing to sit down with an organization and let them be dissected, if you will?

Jamie Sullivan:

Yeah. My experience is they are. Yeah, absolutely. They're, this is you know, this is another evolutionary you know whole market segment for cloud providers, right. Getting into the government and mission-critical applications, you know largely to now they've been a sort of iPhone application type, right? Type data storage in the cloud type thing. And they're expanding. It's becoming a bigger deal for them. And yeah, they're willing to sit down and talk about what they can do, and the certifications they have, the resources they have, the support staff they have, their skillset and that sort of thing.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Thanks Jamie. So, Eric, if you were a public sector organization leader and thinking about a cloud migration, how would you go about ensuring that you select the right provider?

Eric Caddy:

Yeah, I think some of the things we've talked about here are going to come back around is going to be a little repetitive, but you know Jamie mentioned before, you know you're selecting a vendor's application. So, some of that is that behind the scenes, they've already made the choice for you. I like the way Jamie put that if you have three vendors and they were selected AWS, the decision has been made if that's the application you want. You know, I think it comes back to educating yourself. Gary touched on a great thing to understand is from a security perspective with FedRAMP or StateRAMP, CJIS you know making sure that the provider behind your vendor is, is complying with those things, I think is really important to understand.

It may drive your decisions. Perhaps a cloud provider is not providing a level of security or standard compliance that perhaps your state or county requires. So that's, again, it gets back to the education. It gets back to having strategy originally that you've sat down and thought about these concepts and, and done your due diligence too, to make sure that when you select a vendor for an application, the underlying technology is not putting you at risk.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

That's very good. Gary, any last thoughts on this?

Gary Pulford:

Yeah. I concur with Eric and Jamie, a lot of it's going to be driven by your application providers, but it's also not uncommon to actually see hybrid environments where one application is, is being supported by AWS, and another application is being supported by Azure, and a third application could be supported by Google. And this comes down to your architecture of how you're going to support those underlying understanding the in or out ability and the latency between those applications as well.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Eric Caddy:

You know, the only one that I can really think of is, is complete avoidance is probably going to be embraced by those who want the full control to still remain with. I get to still walk into the back-room and see all the blinky lights on my machine, and you know what, for some, that's important. And I really that's the only situation I can think that you just would avoid it. I would think that most agencies should be looking to understand this technology more and understanding how they can leverage it.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Gary Pulford:

In addition, to ask that aspect, there's some data, data, privacy issues that might arise depending on what the architecture and where the locations are. I don't see it as much in the US, but if you go to Europe and some of the GDPR requirements where data has to remain within the physical boundaries of the government. That if the data centers are outside that area, that can cause some issues.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

Jamie, final thoughts?

Jamie Sullivan:

Not much to add. I mean, perhaps PSAPs that have undergone a lot of change recently or had a bad incident occur recently, perhaps they would avoid a large project like a cloud migration, you know I don't know. I'm not sure that avoid is the right word altogether. I think delay is maybe a better word. I think a lot of everything probably will end up in the cloud someday, but maybe not right now. For a lot of you know, 911 agencies, we've talked about rolling things out one application at a time, and that's probably how it's going to go. But total avoidance probably not. Gary said it right at the top, I think was that a lot of these vendors, these application providers, this is their roadmap to get to the cloud. So, at some point, you're going to have, so maybe delays the better word, but nothing, nothing real sort of concrete sort of other than what's been said that I think would lead you to avoid it altogether.

Glenn Bischoff (host):

I think that that's a great distinction between avoid and delay. That makes a lot of sense to me. So anyway, unfortunately, we have reached the end of our time together. I'd like to thank our viewers for listening in on this podcast. And I'm certain that you're going to walk away with some very usable and useful information.

I also like to thank my colleagues, Eric Caddy, Gary Pulford, and Jamie Sullivan, for carving out some time for us today. I'll close by wishing you a great rest of the day. And we hope to see you again soon on another MCP Podcast Network session. So on.

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