The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the launch of final versions of cloud and data strategies wherein the premium version of NOAA’s IT infrastructure will drive innovation and advancement across science, products, and services.
The cloud strategy aligns with the Federal Cloud Strategy and shares a common vision and idea of future cloud initiatives. The new strategy backs rapid cloud adoption, promotes broad and secure access to NOAA’s data, manages shared enterprise cloud services, and tries to patch in the cloud-ready workforce.
Also, the agency works with weather prediction, climate monitoring, and ocean models. The assessments of living marine resources have already pushed advances in analysis, data storage, and dissemination. The NOAA strategy stated that NOAA’s data resources are growing at such a rapid speed that they place “a premium on our capacity and wherewithal to scale the IT infrastructure and services to support this growth. Modernizing our infrastructure requires leveraging cloud services as a solution to meet future demand.”
The NOAA strategy aims to establish default architecture of cloud services, render a unified migration approach, and share solutions on a broad scale. “It is clear that the demand for accessible and user-friendly cloud services and modeling is growing,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “With this update, NOAA will modernize how users can access and use data,” he further added.
Observing the increasing volume and velocity of data stores and data acquisition capabilities, the data strategy works on parameters of optimizing data usage, promoting openness and transparency, and protecting data’s quality, security, privacy, integrity, and confidentiality. The new version of the cloud and data strategy also aims to organize several data management directives and align NOAA’s approach with Federal Data Strategy.
Moreover, NOAA’s other strategies on unnamed systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and a forthcoming strategy on citizen science will come together and “accelerate the implementation of the most effective science and technology applications to advance NOAA’s mission, including protecting life and property and growing the American Blue Economy,” agency officials said.