This past year has done a lot for driving growth in modern IT infrastructure. While the circumstances were less than ideal, the result of an increasingly agile, collaborative, cloud-powered approach to IT is a silver lining. With a new administration in the White House and a growing remote workforce, EDGE360 looked at what IT priorities are in the forefront for federal agencies for 2021 and beyond.
Here are what thought leaders in the space predict will be key priorities for federal IT moving forward:
5 Federal IT Trends to Watch in 2021
In a recent article in FedTech Magazine, various experts across the public sector offered their insights on trends such as how the Biden administration will support IT modernization efforts, Zero Trust’s increasing importance in cybersecurity, and how we can expect remote work to continue evolving.
“Work from home has proven to be successful for many types of jobs,” says Shawn McCarthy, IDC’s research director for government infrastructure and systems optimization strategies. “It’s likely to continue. I don’t expect the look and feel of teleconferencing to change much, but there will be a need at many agencies to either get the tech they need from the cloud or to build out their virtualized infrastructure if they want to do everything in-house.”
The importance of building in IT infrastructures that support those technologies and the country’s new approach to collaboration in the workplace cannot be understated.
Read more here.
Cybersecurity, Modernization Top Priorities for Federal CIOs
In an article from Information Week, Gartner Senior Research Director Michael Brown states that among the top IT-related priorities for the Biden administration will be a refreshed focus on cybersecurity in light of recent attacks on public sector organizations. Titled the American Rescue Plan, the new proposed stimulus package is calling for more than $10 billion to be spent on cybersecurity and IT modernization efforts, among other IT-related areas.
“In addition to the COVID-19 crisis, we also face a crisis when it comes to the nation’s cybersecurity,” a brief of the plan reads, according to Information Week. “The recent cybersecurity breaches of federal government data systems underscore the importance and urgency of strengthening U.S. cybersecurity capabilities. President Biden is calling on Congress to launch the most ambitious effort ever to modernize and secure federal IT and networks.”
Network security, specifically the utilization of a Zero Trust approach, has quickly risen to the top of priority lists for most IT decision makers in the past year, with marked increases in cyber attacks during the pandemic. It’s imperative for federal agencies with highly sensitive data to think strategically about how to best apply those tactics moving forward and baking comprehensive cybersecurity into the plan from the outset.
Read more here.
How HyperFlex Improves Data Center Operations for Mission-Critical Workloads
The EDGE360 team recently spoke with Anthony Rosati, Product Business Manager for Cisco Data Center at SYNNEX Comstor, about the importance of flexible, agile infrastructure and how hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) returned to the limelight with the “new normal.” As workforces continue to spread out, and remain that way, their data, devices, and applications follow suit. So, an infrastructure that supports that work style is no longer a perk, but a necessity. Rosati shared with us how tools such as Cisco Hyperflex help support a remote workforce.
“Built on Cisco’s UCS server portfolio, Cisco’s HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure system enables the benefits of cloud (such as agility and a pay-as-you-go model) while also supporting distributed computing across multiple sites, all managed via Cisco Intersight and optimized via Intersight Workload Optimizer, which Cisco announced recently,” Rosati explained.
An agile approach to IT infrastructure is key in maintaining an efficient remote workforce. That is even more crucial at the federal level, considering we are at the start of a new presidential administration and in the midst of a global pandemic. Supporting a remote work environment will help ensure progress continues in federal agencies.
Read more here.
