Systems Migration Sees ATF Bureau Going From Zero to 80 Percent in the Cloud

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives overcame its apprehensions about technology and has migrated from an antiquated on-premise data center to the cloud, according to ATF Chief Technology Officer Mason McDaniel. The official said the transition took the agency from zero cloud utilization a few years ago to 80 percent currently, Federal News Network reported.

ATF’s information technology officials were faced with the challenge of explaining the modern technology shift to non-technical executives. However, the alternative was losing all their offline data with no backup and long restoration hours in case the data center gets destroyed.

The bureau relied on an old data center and resorted to minor bug fixes without any systems enhancement at all. With the cloud shift, the ATF has gone into full production with the support of automation both in terms of infrastructure and deployment. One of the challenges the agency is facing now is efficiently moving applications and workloads into the cloud.

The ATF plans to shut down the data center once all systems are migrated.