MAY 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9infrastructure overhead and support costs, including hardware and software upgrade expenses while providing new productivity tools and capabilities. The NRC anticipates cost savings to recoup our migration investment within two years. The cloud services also provide enhanced security capabilities such as data loss prevention and digital rights management, improve user experience with added e-mail storage capacity, and simplify the implementation of record retention policies. In addition, Office 365 opens up more opportunities to expand the agency's capabilities to support a collaborative and team-oriented workplace and to support the agency's mobile workforce. As part of building the infrastructure foundation to support Office 365, the NRC established new network capabilities to enable secured and optimized connectivity with the cloud service provider computing environments. This effort was complex, as it required coordination with multiple service providers to implement network configuration changes. However, the NRC expects this effort will improve quality of service and pay off quickly as this solution will accelerate other cloud service implementation initiatives through a unified direct network connection.The NRC is also replacing, our high performance computing capabilities with the Amazon Web Services' GovCloud infrastructure-as-a-service offering. Through this effort, the NRC expects to realize a variety of benefits, including a decrease in standalone computers and data centers; improved service reliability, availability and flexibility for users; efficient use of scalable computing resources; and the ability to pay for only the computing resources used. The initial focus is to migrate, 70 scientific algorithms used for NRC analysis to inform regulatory decision-making. The NRC anticipates significant savings for service operation and maintenance costs, and expects to recoup the implementation cost within 3 years. Although the NRC prioritizes SaaS and platform-as-a-service as generally more cost effective, infrastructure-as-a-service is, in this case, best suited for the initial transformation of high performance computing capabilities. Nonetheless, one SaaS service that looks promising for further high performance computing cost and efficiency optimization is server-less computing (such as Amazon Web Services' Lambda and Microsoft Azure Functions).The NRC also has a demand for a secured file sharing solution to enable collaborative activities with agency mission affiliates with the flexibility to access the service from anywhere and without the need to expand the agency's network infrastructure. The NRC evaluated several options and selected a SaaS offering that will deliver the required capabilities while meeting the agency's security requirements. This service is also interoperable with other cloud services in use at the NRC such as Microsoft Office 365 and IBM MaaS360, and enables agency staff to seamlessly manage the entire lifecycle of content, from creation to retention to disposition, all on a single platform. This service offering also provides the NRC with the ability to automate security policy enforcement to prevent unauthorized downloads, uploads, or sharing of sensitive information.Looking toward the future, the NRC plans to establish a cloud-broker technical facilitation service. The agency plans to partner with the broker to operationalize service management capabilities establish an integrated environment that monitors all cloud service usage and performance, further enable the agency's demand management practices, and assist the NRC to right-size and prioritize its cloud service adoption portfolio. The agency is also evaluating the use of platform-as-a-service cloud services to support future business process automation needs. In doing so, the NRC anticipates that such services will help the agency accelerate process improvement initiatives, provide a more cost-effective solution platform by adopting a low-code development approach, and allow the agency to take advantage of value-added features. We took the leap to adopt cloud computing understanding the opportunity costs of inaction
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