Over the past several years, private sector adoption of cloud technologies has rapidly grown, but has only recently started to gain traction among government agencies. Mainframe computing is still pervasive across the government sector, even though maintaining these solutions has become increasingly more expensive and complex, and the systems themselves are less secure than ever.

At the same time, government agencies are facing more urgent calls to reduce spending and modernize their computing architectures — which means moving beyond legacy computing architectures and shifting more applications and workloads to the cloud.

Although many federal, state and local government agencies have already started their journey to the cloud, many agencies still express concerns about overall cloud security, the ability to meet government regulatory requirements and the complexity of the migration process itself, which can be challenging and put application availability at risk.