FCC Wants to Operate 100 Percent in the Cloud by the End of 2017

Few agencies in any government sector have approached cloud computing with as aggressive a plan as the Federal Communications Commission. For many years, the agency was behind the technological curve, relying on an aging infrastructure -- particularly ironic given FCC’s position as an authority in the communications realm. It won’t be behind the curve much longer. The FCC is going all-in on cloud computing and is currently in the middle of a “lift-and-shift,” which describes the lifting of internal servers off premise and the shift in modernizing its many applications for cloud.

“The FCC is lifting their servers, shifting entirely to cloud computing and rewriting their applications for cloud and everything in the future,” said Tony Summerlin, senior strategic adviser for FCC. By the end of fiscal 2017, FCC expects to be at or very close to “100 percent cloud,” with no applications running on its own equipment. Instead, FCC will make use of platform- and software-as-a-service offerings.