Amid High Demand, Peace Corps Turns to Cloud

The Peace Corps has been receiving more volunteer service applications than ever before, so it’s turning to the cloud to handle the spike in interest and to further improve its recruiting efforts

Using a cloud-based solution to help fill volunteer openings across 140 countries is part of broader changes undertaken by the agency to personalize its recruitment efforts. Those changes also included the five-year modernization of its Volunteer Delivery System – once a collection of siloed databases operated under various governance practices.

Peace Corps will use the Kenexa Talent Suite, a software-as-a-service solution that will run on IBM SoftLayer’s federal cloud infrastructure. The hybrid cloud environment will integrate Peace Corps’ internal applications while incorporating the mobile and social capabilities provided by Kenexa, allowing applicants to connect to each other and Peace Corps staff prior to what are usually two-year service deployments.

It’s worth noting that Kenexa was purchased by IBM in 2012, two years after it was selected by the Peace Corps to carry out its Volunteer Delivery System, so there’s familiarity there between product lines.

The thinking behind the tech leap by the Peace Corps is straightforward: Today’s youth are connected to their devices and social media, so any talent recruitment platform had better leverage those technologies. Doing so while using the scalability and flexibility cloud computing offers – while ridding itself of segmented silos, or pockets of data that aren’t intelligently used – also makes better business sense.

“Federal agencies are viewing cloud much more strategically than infrastructure alone,” IBM U.S. Federal general manager Anne Altman said in a statement. “For the Peace Corps, it’s about engaging an audience that wants to actively participate in the volunteer application process and is accustomed to using new tools for such interactions.”

Hybrid cloud solutions are the most common cloud solutions in government because they provide a perk like scalability, while alleviating some of perceived security concerns by allowing agencies to continue using their internal data centers.

But cloud computing isn’t just infrastructure-as-a-service offerings in government anymore. Several platform- and software-as-a-service offerings are making their way to the federal market. As the Peace Corps deal demonstrates, there is likely to be a big demand for them.

(Image via belekekin/Shutterstock.com)