The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is making progress in its efforts to shift toward further use of cloud-based systems, with 60 percent of its applications now hosted in the cloud, the agency’s top technology official said on April 18.
FEMA Chief Information Officer Charlie Strong discussed that cloud progress during a webinar hosted by Federal News Network.
“We’ve got some modernization programs going on that are actually building new in cloud that will eventually replace some of the legacy systems that we have,” the CIO said.
“Those are things like grants management and FEMAGO, which hit their full operational capability at the end of March. And now they’re working on a lot of data transition,” Strong said.
“We actually hit about 60 percent of the applications migrated out of our current center and into the various” cloud service provider that the agency is using, he said.
Strong said that work has not been without its challenges given the number of legacy systems that FEMA has been working with.
“We have a fair amount of legacy applications that reside in our FEMA data center,” he said. “And we struck out on a goal about a year and a half ago to get those … applications migrated to the cloud, primarily through a lift-and-shift approach.”
“Now of course, the work gets a little bit more difficult because as the engineering and technical pieces get harder, that may slow down our velocity a little bit,” Strong said. “But the goal was to get everything migrated out of that center so that we could start to decommission it and shut it down. That’s kind of the primary work stream that we have going on.”
