Federal agencies spent the last several years moving applications and infrastructure into cloud environments, often under pressure from modernization mandates and cybersecurity requirements.

The harder work is happening now: deciding which legacy systems still make sense, which ones can be reworked for cloud environments and how to modernize without disrupting mission delivery, said Jonathan Gines, a staff enterprise solutions architect at Splunk.

The question is no longer whether to adopt cloud. In many cases, adoption has already happened. The harder question is what comes after the move, especially for agencies carrying decades-old systems, fragmented data and workforces stretched between daily operations and long-term change, Gines said during Federal News Network’s Cloud Exchange 2026.

Agencies are finding that adoption was only the first stage of the work, he said.

“What I see with federal agencies is they’ve already passed adoption, but now they’re modernizing … and realizing that there’s a train of applications that need to make it into the cloud as part of their modernization roadmap,” Gines noted. “But there’s a lot of difficulty in getting it so that it’s actually going to behave as it was on prem, but in the cloud.”

Legacy systems slow federal cloud modernization

That tension shows up first in the systems agencies depend on every day. Benefits platforms, tax processing systems and financial management tools sit at the center of operations, but many were built for a different computing era, Gines said. They run on aging infrastructure, rely on older programming languages and are often sustained by people carrying years of institutional knowledge toward retirement.

That leaves agencies with few clean options, he said. Some applications can be refactored for cloud environments. Others may need to stay where they are because the cost, risk or complexity of moving them is too high.

In some cases, retirement makes more sense than rebuilding. What sounds like a technical exercise is really a mission decision about where agencies should spend limited time, money and expertise.

That is why application rationalization matters. Agencies have to sort through what they run, what each system supports, what depends on it and whether it still belongs in the future architecture. Those decisions rarely stand alone. Federal environments are tightly connected, so changing one system can disturb several others that share data, platforms or security controls.

Agencies are also trying to modernize while maintaining service, meeting compliance requirements and managing hiring and procurement cycles that move far more slowly than commercial technology, Gines pointed out. That helps explain why cloud modernization often feels less like a discrete project than a continuing series of tradeoffs.

Federal agencies need better cloud data governance

The same problem surfaces in data. As agencies expand cloud use and add artificial intelligence tools, data becomes part of the modernization challenge. It has to be understood, governed and made usable across systems that were never built to work together, Gines said.

That starts with basic visibility. Agencies need to know what data they have, where it comes from, who relies on it and whether it can support analytics or AI use cases without creating new risk, he said. That inventory work can be simple to describe and difficult to execute, especially in organizations where data has grown up inside separate programs and platforms.

“What struggles I see is having an understanding of the inventory of data sources available to them — where does the data actually come from, and also how’s the data actually being used?” Gines said. “Oftentimes, they say, ‘Everything.’ ”

Agencies that are farther along usually did that work early. They mapped data sources, created more consistent ways to collect and analyze information and treated governance as part of the architecture, not an afterthought. That gives them more room to scale shared services, analytics platforms or distributed data environments without losing control over how information is used.

Mission needs shape cloud decisions

Cloud modernization only works when technical decisions stay tied to mission needs, Gines said. Engineers may focus on performance, architecture and resilience. Program leaders are more likely to focus on service delivery, cost, compliance and operational risk. If those conversations happen on separate tracks, agencies can end up with systems that look modern on paper but are difficult to approve, sustain or use, he said.

That is one reason compliance and governance teams matter early in the process. In federal settings, modernization is more than a question of whether a system can be built. It is also a question of whether it can meet security, oversight and operational requirements without forcing expensive redesign later.

Gines said there are signs of progress. Some agencies are shifting appropriate functions to software as a service platforms, reducing the infrastructure burden on internal teams. Others are building more directly in cloud environments, accepting the need for deeper in-house expertise in exchange for flexibility and lower maintenance costs over time. Neither path makes the complexity go away though, he said.

The federal cloud story now is less about migration than about judgment. Agencies still have to inventory systems and data, weigh risk against mission needs and decide what is worth rebuilding. The move to cloud may have been the visible milestone. The harder work is deciding what the enterprise should look like after the move, Gines said.

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