According to Federal Emergency Management Agency Chief Information Officer Charles Armstrong, agency applications that are not yet ready for cloud migration will first have to undergo re-platforming — the process of upgrading them to become cloud-native — Federal News Network reported Friday.
Armstrong said during an interview on the Ask the CIO program that five to six workloads, including the agency’s training system, are expected to have completed the process by the end of the calendar year.
Re-platforming is one of the methods that FEMA plans to implement to deal with the applications that have yet to be moved out from the agency’s data center, which Armstrong says he hopes to eventually decommission.
The FEMA CIO said that 60 percent of the applications previously housed by the data center have already been moved to the cloud.
As for the remainder that would be too costly to re-platform and would likely be shut down following modernization, one option is their transfer from the data center to a co-location facility.
“It’s more cost efficient to move to a co-location facility so that we can shut down an aging facility and not have to recapitalize things like the power and heating and cooling, and things like that,” Armstrong explained.