The year 2013 was a busy one for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which moved its website and email to various cloud infrastructures to achieve greater operational efficiency and costs savings.

A law enforcement agency within the Department of Justice, ATF moved atf.gov to a Drupal platform operated by Acquia and hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure. In the same year, the bureau also moved 7,500 email users to the Microsoft Office 365 cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform, said Rick Holgate, ATF's assistant director for science and technology and CIO.

Many agencies seeking to modernize and deliver a digital experience to citizens are using Drupal, an open source web content management system, which lets organizations launch new websites quickly and customize functionality based on mission and audience. The White House and the DOJ websites are powered by Drupal.

Meanwhile, agencies have turned to Google Apps for Government or Microsoft Office 365, the two primary cloud-based messaging and office productivity platforms, to bring down the costs for maintaining and administrating email and office applications. Both products offer agencies more robust tools for helping staff more easily share documents, participate in workgroups, and access email and information from mobile devices.

Email is typically the first application that agencies move to the cloud, according to a survey of 150 federal IT leaders conducted by MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving the outcomes of government IT. Fifty percent of those who have implemented cloud say they have moved email. Additionally, 45 percent report they have moved Web hosting, and 43 percent have migrated servers/storage, according to the report, Cloud Without The Commitment.

ATF's move to Microsoft Office 365 "insulated us from obsolescence," a benefit that is hard to measure in dollars, Holgate said recently at the Microsoft Federal Executive Forum 2015, in Washington, D.C. The agency moved 7,500 email users from Microsoft Outlook, giving the ATF workforce larger mailboxes along with robust collaborations tools.

The Outlook mailboxes maxed out at 250 megabytes, but with the switch to Office 365 users immediately got 5 gigabytes of storage capacity as well as SharePoint collaboration software, which they did not have prior to the move to the cloud, Holgate told Federal Times in an interview. Other improvements included archiving and discovery capabilities as well improved availability.

One of the main challenges was achieving the level of security that would meet the requirements of a law enforcement agency such as the ATF. After reviewing audit logs, agency officials determined that Microsoft Office 365 adhered to the security controls detailed in the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Special Publication 800-53. However, the real concerns involved the background checks and security clearances of Microsoft's operational team who would have access to ATF data.

ATF needed to understand "who had access to our data and if we could trust people who had access to our data with that level of access," Holgate said. It took ATF "the course of a year" to solve personnel security issues before the agency moved to Office 365 in a dedicated environment that supports International Traffic in Arms Regulations. ATF is looking to evolve into the next version of Microsoft Office 365 for ITAR, which will offer more agility and scalability, Holgate noted. The agency will also explore the possibility of putting more E-forms into the cloud, he said.

The ATF issued a task order for Microsoft Office 365 in June 2012 as part of a DOJ enterprise agreement contract. By January 2013, the agency had defined its requirements and initiated user awareness and adoption plans. The agency's IT team had also "cleaned" on premise Microsoft Active Directory and public folders in preparation for the move to the cloud. They also ordered, tested and activated network circuits through the DOJ's wide-area network, the Justice Unified Telecommunications Network or JUTNet. Other transition work included the validation of network ports and firewall rules, upgrading mobility device management tools for Office 365 compatibility, synchronization of the ATF Active Directory, and pilot testing, according to a presentation Holgate has given on the migration effort. Actually migration of the workforce to Office 365 took about a week, he said. ATF eventually deployed Office 365 Dedicated for ITAR in mid-2013.

Enterprise identity management is a key prerequisite and information and content governance must be defined prior to deployment, according to Holgate.

DOL found email business case easy to make

Selling the idea of deploying a cloud-based email solution wasn't a difficult sale at the Department of Labor, said CIO Dawn Leaf, who also spoke at the Microsoft Federal Executive Forum. There was a business case for it because the workforce wanted large mailboxes and more storage space.

Last year, DOL completed migration of nine different legacy email systems to a single federal community cloud service, Microsoft Office 365. That move gave DOL's 17,000-employee workforce 400 times as much storage as they had before.

The challenge was standardizing across a federated organization. The IT staff had to modify the firewalls, and move a more consolidated infrastructure just to get to the new service. "There is a fair amount you have do to your infrastructure to be able to access the final services. We found 150 inconsistencies across our agencies – per agency – in our network and access infrastructure to get to the cloud," Leaf said.

In making its transition to Office 365 for Government, the Environmental Protection Agency moved more than 25,000 employee mailboxes, some of which it discovered held more than a million e-mails. The transition, completed in 2013 is expected to save the EPA approximately $12 million over the four-year contract period.

"The move to Office 365 grew from a pilot of advanced collaboration tools that would help the agency conduct our operations more efficiently and support our work with multiple stakeholders," said Harrell Watkins, acting chief technology officer and acting director of EPA's Office of Technology Operations and Planning.

Going forward, any existing production applications slated to move to the public cloud will most certainly require re-engineering and customization. "As such, consideration for moving systems and applications to the public cloud will coincide with the [IT] refresh cycle. This ensures we minimize any stranded depreciation or sunk costs," Watkins said.

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