After a decade-long initiative to expand telework, the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the federal government’s workforce to cloud-based telework, practically overnight. While improving workforce flexibility seems like the obvious benefit, federal agencies can also take this opportunity to leverage the extensive ecosystem of open source partners and applications to boost their multicloud modernization efforts.

Agencies that work with the global open source development community are able to accelerate service delivery and overcome many of the common barriers to cloud modernization.

“Within the open source community, there remains a strong focus in helping enterprises adapt to cloud computing and improve mission delivery, productivity and security,” says Christine Cox, Regional Vice President Federal Sales for SUSE. Developing applications with open source tools can also help federal agencies future-proof digital services by avoiding vendor lock-in, enhancing their enterprise security and supporting their high-performance computing requirements.

Why open source is important to federal agencies as they continue to telework

Agencies are working to solve unique and complex orchestration challenges to run applications and sensitive data across multiple cloud environments. They need to be able to respond quickly, with agility, and at scale. Open source solutions allow governments to design customized and secure environments as the interoperability of their agencies’ IT systems and the need to share information in real time across multicloud environments becomes more critical.

“Open source technologies like Kubernetes and cloud native technologies enable a broad array of applications because they serve as a reliable connecting mechanism for a myriad of open source innovations — from supporting various types of infrastructures and adding AI/ML capabilities, to making developers’ lives simpler and business applications more streamlined,” said Cox.

Ultimately, open source projects will help lower costs and improve efficiencies by replacing legacy solutions that are increasingly costly to maintain. Up-to-date open source solutions also create a more positive outcome for the end-users at all agencies — be they the warfighter or taxpayers.

How open source helps cloud migration in a remote environment

The archaic procurement practices based on vendor lock-in don’t allow for effective modernization projects, which is why implementing open source code can help agencies adapt tools to their current needs.

“One of the great benefits about SUSE, and open source, is that we offer expanded support, so that regardless of what you’re currently running in your environment, we can be vendor-agnostic,” Cox says.

In order to take greater advantage of open source enterprise solutions, agency leaders should practice a phased approach to projects, with the help of trusted partners who can guide them in their cloud computing efforts. This allows leaders to migrate to hybrid-cloud or multicloud environments in manageable chunks and in a way that eliminates wasteful spending.

Learn more at SUSEgov.com