The nominees included federal employees that used data innovation to track Zika, developed air traffic control systems for drones and mitigated the impact of WannaCry.

From the constant talk in Washington of developing a modernization fund, one might think that cost is the major roadblock facing agencies that are trying to ignite cloud migrations. But industry leaders told FedScoop at the Amazon Web Services' re: Invent conference that the real barriers are a lack of leadership and a skills gap on buying and using cloud services.