State Department Seeks Higher Stake in Cloud

Decision-makers at the U.S. Department of State are looking to increase the agency’s stake in cloud computing while mulling a revamp in the way the department pays for technology. Leaders seek to modernize the agency’s application portfolio and move decisions about software closer to business owners, FCW reported Wednesday.

The new cloud push can be gleaned from a recent request for information, where the department expressed its intention to shift development activities closer to the business owner, saying an Application Platform as a Service model could support the transition. The agency said an aPaaS solution could supply tools to prototype, test and make decisions about applications quickly.

The State Department said in its RFI that it seeks to shift from buying with “a focus on final operational capacity” to paying only for IT services that is actually consumed. The agency explained that this retail approach will allow it to better work with changing IT expenditures while increasing innovation and improving its return on IT investments.

Moreover, the department said it would rather invest on a multiplatform application which offers no code and low code architecture, allowing even those with minimal programming experience to build and deploy applications. The DOS clarified that it needs a multitenant enterprise capability tool to provide support for machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The agency, however, said that whatever solution it ends up procuring, it must be approved at the FedRAMP moderate level.

The State Department began moving its operations to the cloud in 2019 and has spent more than $2 billion on IT each fiscal year since then. During this period, the agency has been forced to contend with unique challenges in securing critical IT infrastructure in environments with adversarial activity and other cybersecurity concerns.

The State Department maintains nearly 300 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions in over 190 countries today.