It’s no secret that the U.S. public sector is struggling to adapt to the information age.

A report issued last week by the U.S. Government Accountability Office studied 65 aging legacy systems still in operation. The highlights show the appalling state of the systems controlling public services: The Education Department still runs on Common Business Oriented Language, the Department of Homeland Security has 168 high or critical vulnerabilities, and Health and Human Services is working with hardware from the 1960s.

No wonder the road to cloud computing is a bumpy one for the public sector.

“The federal government … has been under about a 10-year directive to go cloud first, and what we’ve seen is a lot of agencies … have struggled,” said Adelaide O’Brien (pictured), research director of government digital transformation strategies at International Data Corp. Government Insights.

O’Brien spoke with John Furrier and Rebecca Knight, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. They discussed how Amazon Web Services Inc. is assisting the U.S. federal government with its cloud computing strategy (see the full interview with transcript here.) (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Adelaide O’Brien in its Women in Tech feature.

A valued thought leader on government cloud

Approachable and unassuming describe O’Brien’s demeanor as she discusses the changes underway in the federal government. Her undisputed depth of knowledge comes from a career that spans both government and information technology. From her start working for state and local government in Minnesota, O’Brien moved into a successful corporate career with companies such as Honeywell, AT&T, Avaya Holding and Lucent Technologies.

Uniting her experiences, she joined information-technology market analysis provider IDC, where she conducts research into the opportunities and risks involved in IT modernization, with a focus on government strategies. O’Brien holds two master’s degrees, an MBA in marketing, and a MPA in public administration.

O’Brien is a sought-after adviser and speaker, with a lengthy list of credits and awards. Her research is frequently quoted in leading industry media outlets, such as CIO Magazine, Forbes and Government Technology, and she was named in 2018’s Federal 100 list of leaders in government IT.

It’s better to be smart than first

The government’s Cloud-First initiative was launched at a time when public cloud was king. Now the pitfalls of wholesale cloud adoption are better understood, and “research shows that ‘cloud first’ isn’t first for federal agencies,” O’Brien said.

In October 2018, the federal cloud computing strategy was modified from Cloud First to Cloud Smart. The new strategy has workforce, procurement and security as its main pillars. Not coincidentally, these three areas are also the main barriers to agencies’ successful adoption of cloud.

Reduced cost is one benefit to moving federal agency workloads into the cloud. Those aging systems need constant repair, and it ain’t cheap: O’Brien quotes a figure of $75 billion for maintaining legacy equipment.

But saving hard-earned taxpayer cash isn’t the only benefit to cloud adoption. “It wasn’t just to be more efficient, to save some of that money … but it was actually thinking about using cloud to be very agile, to help deliver better citizen services,” O’Brien stated.

Cloud Smart supports the objectives of 2017’s Modernizing Government Technology Act, according to O’Brien, meaning that both the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are now supporting the federal move to cloud.

A most-trusted gov cloud provider

The biggest barrier to moving to cloud is, and has always been, security. To ensure agencies only used products and services from secure sources, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, created a special certification category for cloud providers to receive authorization and approval. Dominating the FedRAMP marketplace is AWS, with 139 services approved within AWS GovCloud and 129 for AWS US East/West.

The FedRAMP seal of approval opened the door for AWS to help federal agencies move into the cloud; but the Central Intelligence Agency migrating its databases sent a clear signal that the AWS GovCloud was secure. “Because the CIA moved to AWS, and they put their most-sensitive information in the cloud, [the Census Bureau] felt comfortable with putting their personally identifiable information in the cloud,” O’Brien stated.

Obtaining FedRAMP certification can be time consuming and costly. So AWS is guiding its ecosystem partners through the certification process. “That’s all good for the government sector … because the more vendors that go through certification … the more they can trust the integrity of their data in the cloud,” O’Brien explained.

AWS’ success in the public sector is due to to the company’s effort to understand the different agencies individual needs, according to O’Brien. “Agencies are actually looking for a partner who can grow with them and learn with them. They want a cloud provider that has skin in the game and that actually helps them. That ear to the ground, knowing the government business, federal, state and local is so, so important.”

Shedding the old-school government culture

Cultural transformation within the workforce is the third barrier to cloud adoption, according to O’Brien. Adopting cloud means becoming more flexible and adaptive to change. This is something that comes as a challenge to culturally conservative federal agencies.

“A lot of the resistance and a lot of the inertia to cloud is not just the technology; it’s training the workforce,” O’Brien said.

Watching how AWS retained its startup culture as it grew into a multinational behemoth shows that size doesn’t preclude spontaneity. “You don’t have to be a Silicon Valley software company to innovate,” O’Brien said. “If you’re innovating … on the cloud … you can start to really get scale there and transform your whole business. It’s all about serving citizens better and innovating to serve them better and automating your processes.”

In the commercial sector, failing to keep up with the speed of technological change can be a company’s death knell. In the public sector, it is the users — the U.S. population — who suffer. AWS is stepping in to understand the needs of the federal sector and assist it in the move to cloud. Shouldn’t federal agencies, in turn, be concerned with the needs of the public who use their services?

Because of the personal impact of public sector downtime and inefficiency, O’Brien urges government executives, and especially those in IT, to “always think of yourself as a service.”

“Help [the public] understand what they need, how they accomplish their mission,” she advised.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Public Sector event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE