Harnessing the Power of Cloud Technology

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

During the pandemic, government employees shifted to remote work, and the demand for digital services skyrocketed. To meet those needs, agencies turned to the cloud. The experience gave them a taste of how essential the technology is to modernization efforts. In a recent survey of FCW readers, 87% of respondents agreed with the statement that cloud technology is a foundation for modernization at their agencies. The shift to cloud-based systems often requires a corresponding shift in budgets, employee skill sets and IT management techniques. When asked what steps would enable broader use of cloud technology at their agencies, 79% of FCW respondents said revamping their approach to managing a mix of on-premises and cloud-based systems. One solution is hybrid environments, which blend in-house legacy systems with cloud services, while multi-cloud environments are spread across many cloud platforms and providers. Hybrid environments will likely be the reality for most agencies. In a recent NASCIO survey, 89% of respondents said hybrid cloud was their ideal cloud state. Learn how your agency can determine an optimal cloud strategy in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Cloud’s Unprecedented Capacity for Innovation

“To make data-driven decisions, an agency needs to be able to access its data without concern for capacity constraints based on recent storage and compute contracts. Public cloud services can offer unprecedented scale and speed, and a cloud provider like Google can help government ingest data, and compute as necessary to answer complex analytics questions in real time. Some of our customers have stored tens of petabytes of data in Google Cloud’s serverless, cost-effective multi-cloud data warehouse, BigQuery. Analysts decide what questions they should ask and BigQuery will determine how much computing is necessary to consume it on demand – all without having to manage or configure the underlying infrastructure and services.”

Read more insights from Google’s Head of Customer Engineering for Federal Civilian Agencies, Andy Murphy.

Why Cloud is the Best Path for Modernization

“Accommodating demands to boost engagement while enabling remote collaboration is a complex challenge. At Microsoft, we think about collaboration as an operating model of people, places and processes, and we’re developing capabilities based on the recognition that each dimension has its own nuances, strengths and weaknesses. For example, when cloud technology is combined with the zero trust-based security approach required by the executive order, it facilitates collaboration among government employees by granting access and participation based on identity, physical location and/or the device they’re using.”

Read more insights from Microsoft Federal’s CTO, Jason Payne.

Maximizing Mission Success with the Cloud

“Most agencies operate hybrid environments that combine on-premises systems with cloud platforms and services. However, there are challenges associated with that approach. Hybrid environments require the ability to manage a diverse set of technologies, tools and operating models and to integrate workloads, applications and services across clouds and on-premises systems. A hybrid cloud environment also changes the traditional security boundary and introduces new vulnerabilities related to the nature of off-premises managed services and the unique attributes of cloud, which include ephemeral services and API-driven, software-defined everything. Fortunately, advanced cloud-based cybersecurity solutions are helping agencies move to zero trust architectures by shifting security services from primary data centers to edge locations to enable rapid analysis and a stronger security posture.”

Read more insights from Peraton’s Vice President of Cloud and Application Services, Gary Wang, and Cloud Architect and Expert on Public Cloud Products for the U.S. Public Sector, Bob Ferrari.

How to Build an Open Hybrid Cloud Ecosystem

“When agencies have a strong cloud environment, they can leverage open source solutions to achieve key modernization goals, such as improving digital services and making better use of data. That’s because open source is at the heart of all innovation. For the past 20-plus years, open source has been where leading technologists first experiment with new ideas that often become enterprise products. Companies like Red Hat and cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft and Google begin new projects by working upstream in the open source community and making broadly shared contributions to the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for one, is the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform that is fully built on open source software. The open source community is also contributing to agencies’ ability to comply with the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity and the government’s zero trust security initiatives.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s North America Cloud GTM Lead, Tres Vance.

Robust Databases for Modern App Development

“Cloud computing has the ability to scale on demand to support modern application development and meet user demands quickly in a secure environment. That’s why we created Atlas for Government, an independent environment of our flagship cloud product MongoDB Atlas. Atlas for Government allows federal, state and local governments to build and iterate faster using a modern database-as-a-service platform. Our innovative approach gives agencies the versatility they need to modernize legacy applications and support the unique requirements and missions of the U.S. government — in a fully managed and secure environment.”

Read more insights from MongoDB’s Sales Director, Jennifer Hayes.

Adopting Zero Trust Data Security in the Cloud

“On the National Association of State CIOs’ 2022 list of its members’ top priorities, cybersecurity is in the first slot, followed by citizen experience. Those two go hand in hand. When a school is hacked and its data stolen, that school will likely be forced to close for days. When a department of corrections is hit with a ransomware attack, it will be in lockdown. And when a public health department’s systems are breached, it will be unable to provide vital services. Those are real-world examples of impacts that are happening across the country, and they illustrate why government agencies can’t wait until tomorrow to address these vulnerabilities. CIOs, chief security officers and IT directors at all levels of government know they need to do something today because they are vulnerable every minute until they do. At Rubrik, we focus on simplifying the protection of data in the cloud while keeping the citizen experience up and running.”

Read more insights from Rubrik’s Vice President and Head of State, Local Government and Education, Jared Vichengrad.

Three Key Goals for Modern IT Environments

“To take full advantage of cloud-based technological advances, agencies must address their legacy IT. In fiscal 2022 to date, the federal government has spent roughly $83 billion on IT, as reported on ITDashboard.gov. A third, or roughly $34 billion, has been spent on the operation and maintenance of legacy IT systems. The rising cost of maintaining legacy IT crowds out investments in newer cloud-based systems that can better serve citizens and federal workers. Mission-critical legacy applications, technologies and services also have many other dependencies that make modernization difficult. Those dependencies exist in the source code and runtime platforms, leveraging specific databases and using data in proprietary formats. Additionally, agencies have unique processes to manage these applications or services and specialized employees. Simply ripping and replacing mission-critical legacy systems is not an option, so successfully modernizing legacy IT requires addressing those issues.”

Read more insights from Micro Focus Government Solution’s Public-Sector CTO, Kevin Hansen.

A Proactive, Automated Approach to Security

“First, cloud dramatically reduces the time it takes to go from the conception of an idea to production. There are no data center build-outs, no equipment purchases, no months-long planning cycles. With cloud, new technologies can be tested almost instantly. Second, cloud providers offer a nearly infinite selection of tools and applications that are readily available on demand. Third, it may not be universally true that cloud costs less, but when it’s managed right, it absolutely should cost less than on-premises systems. Although cloud technology presents agencies with a tremendous opportunity, trying to manage the extended enterprise as it expands into and across the cloud will require a proactive approach to monitoring and security.”

Read more insights from Oracle’s Director of Solution Engineering, James Donlon.

Data Protection in Hybrid Cloud Environments

“Colonial Pipeline’s situation is something of an anomaly because one study showed that 96% of companies with a trusted backup and disaster recovery plan were able to survive ransomware attacks. However, only 31% of organizations test their disaster recovery plans, which is crucial to ensure that agencies understand the steps involved and can respond effectively in a crisis. Therefore, agencies should choose data protection solutions that include the ability to conduct automated disaster recovery rehearsals on a regular basis. The key to any disaster recovery solution is automation. Without automation, a timely wide-scale recovery is not achievable. Agencies should also be aware that many commercial solutions were born in the enterprise data center and run on architectures that do not support autonomous solutions that scale up or down based on the client’s demand.”

Read more insights from Veritas’s Director of Sales Engineering for Public Sector, Mike Malaret.

Providing a True Mac Experience in the Cloud

“People enjoy the Mac experience and are using more and more macOS-based tools, but they often don’t have remote access to Mac hardware for their jobs. As agencies continue to provide support for remote workers, they must consider how to provide access to Macs for the employees who rely on them for development, design or general office use. Some IT teams set up a physical Mac in a data center and create a network to attach to it, but creating remote access to a machine that’s far away makes it hard to fix problems when they arise. Instead, MacStadium has developed purpose-built technologies that create cloud-based Mac desktops. Cloud Access delivers high-performance remote desktop experiences from the MacStadium cloud to any device. And this year, we are adding Orka Workspaces, which enables high-performance desktop access to cloud-hosted macOS resources via a browser from any workstation or device. Those scalable, flexible technologies can be pushed out on demand to achieve a true Mac experience.”

Read more insights from MacStadium’s Senior Vice President and CTO, Chris Chapman.

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these cloud thought leaders and additional industry research from FCW.

IT Modernization for Campus Re-entry

Posted on by Tim Boltz

Many colleges and universities are poised to emerge from the pandemic stronger than they went in. In large part, they have used the last year to accelerate their adoption of online education where it makes sense, keeping the physical classroom time dedicated to experiential forms of learning. A theme among these institutions is the need to understand what the IT infrastructure can support and how well it’s holding up as institutional demands ebb and flow. A Campus Technology “pulse survey” among IT leaders and professionals found that while the impact of remote learning and work made their jobs harder rather than easier (by 11 percentage points), the outcomes have been worth the effort. Four times as many participants agreed than disagreed that their organization’s response to the pandemic was improving the way they deliver services to students, faculty and staff. Learn how your institution can continue to adapt IT infrastructure in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Education report.

Mastering the Art and Design of Remote Work

“On a traditional physical computing device like a workstation, PC or laptop, a GPU typically performs all the capture, encode and rendering for power complex tasks, such as 3D apps and video. NVIDIA virtual GPU technology virtualizes GPUs installed in the data center to be shared across multiple virtual machines or users. The rendering and encoding are done on the virtual machines’ host server rather than on a physical endpoint device. The basic idea is to share the GPU functionality with multiple users and give them the same experience as they’d have if they were running applications on dedicated workstations. The advantage is this: Instead of having a one-to-one connection — one GPU per computer — you get one-to-many. The physical GPU runs in a server and the vGPU software dynamically slices it up to allow multiple users to access its power (up to as many as 64 users per GPU).”

Read more insights from NVIDIA’s Senior Product Specialist, Ismet Nesicolaci.

Easier Identity and Access Management

“Single sign-on (SSO) has long been a boon for making the authentication process more efficient. Yet, because of their distributed structures, most institutions haven’t gone all the way with SSO. It may be that program control for the identity and access management (IAM) layer is maintained for some applications by central IT and for others by a given college or department. IT may lack the staff to keep up with the programming requirements and/or the sudden influx of new demand. Or the college or university may be working with other institutions, each operating autonomously even as they need to share people, programs and research data. Then there are the security aspects. While SSO makes for a centralized approach to application access, that access also poses a big risk: If a cybercriminal gets unauthorized access through the SSO, they will be able to access all of the associated applications. Embedding multi-factor authentication (MFA) into the login process adds a needed level of protection to authentication processes to keep accounts truly secure. But students are still stuck with multiple logins, and institutions have to try to keep up with a sprawling and complicated IAM system.”

Read more insights from Okta’s Senior CIAM Developer Specialist, Ryan Schaller.

Evolving with IT to Support Research

“While institutions have expressed continuing concern about wobbling tuition and ancillary dollars, one source of revenue remains healthy for higher education: COVID-19 research funded by federal and state programs. The full measure, from community colleges to Research 1s, are at the forefront of projects to develop vaccines; uncover the sources of coronavirus and its evolving replication patterns; create new initiatives for public health response; understand the impact of the virus on various populations; study the physical and mental health and learning effects of prolonged quarantine; and explore numerous other facets.. However, the heightened attention on campus research comes with a continuing challenge: how to keep up with IT infrastructure needs, typically assembled once the grant funding arrives. Since many of these recent grants are shortterm, turnaround time can be tight. In many cases, research teams are going from near-zero infrastructure to running as quickly as possible — and not just serving applications to users, but storing, processing and sharing astronomical amounts of data.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Chief Architect for Higher Education for the North America Public Sector, Damien Eversmann.

Your Starting Point for IT Optimization

“The university IT shop doesn’t typically head to Best Buy when it’s time to update infrastructure. Acquisitions have to go through internal planning and approval, budgeting and ordering — and it all takes time. Having visibility into usage trends enables the IT department to better plan, thereby preventing gaps in performance and operations and opening up ample time to line up the funding needed. Best-of-breed monitoring takes that a step further, pulling in information from outside sources, so the IT crew doesn’t have to wonder. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, for example, links up with the relevant hardware and software to notify you when a vendor has put an end-of-support notice out. If Cisco has issued an end-of-of life message for a given switch, it serves as an early indicator for you to help plan timing of replacement.”

Read more insights from SolarWinds’ Vice President of Product Strategy for Security for Compliance and Tools, Brandon Shopp.

Building the Virtualized Student Union

“The IT organization has been at the heart of successful pivoting as remote teaching and learning have dominated. As a result, now that campuses are starting to return to normalcy, administration will rely on IT to continue enabling the work of enhancing the student experience. That’s especially true if, as many experts predict, hybrid or blended learning will forevermore be part of the modernized college experience. Integration is a big part of the solution. Forget about forcing students to figure out the dozens of different apps and websites they need to fully partake of college. IT needs to integrate the learning management platform, digital content, student support services, health and wellness, esports, collaboration, campus calendar and student information — enfolding them into a virtual student union. This idea goes beyond the student portal, which has been around for a long time. What’s new is the idea of marrying systems that may be PC-based, on-premise-based and cloud-based into a single hub and then wrapping that in a blanket of security that’s transparent to the user. That becomes a game-changer for the student experience.”

Read more insights from VMware’s SLED Strategist, Herb Thompson; VP of State, Local, and Education, Doug Harvey; and Senior National Director for SLED Business Development, John Punzak.

Accelerating Student Success with AI

“As growth in undergraduate credential earning has come to a standstill over the last year, colleges and universities are seeking new ways to draw in the right candidates while also holding onto the students they have by bolstering student success efforts. Numerous institutions of higher education are finding success in strategic aspects of the academic lifecycle by embedding the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are several areas where Google sees the potential for “quick wins” in student success initiatives: optimized enrollment and admission, such as automating the activities of credit transfer analysis, document analysis and personalized course planning; virtual assistance, for delivering 24/7 online tutoring and support in multiple languages answering common questions about required courses, financial aid and other topical subjects; and student engagement, like tracking engagement and predicting which students are at risk, to maximize retention.”

Read more insights from Google Cloud’s Cloud Strategic Business Executive for Higher Education and Research, Jesus Trujillo Gomez.

A Conversation with Jen Leasure

“As everything went online and was done with technology, institutions needed to invest in new solutions to support their researchers, their faculty, their students, their administration, in conducting their business — and with limited budgets. We know that everyone’s been having particular budget constraints, and they’re looking to maximize the benefits of these types of programs and their discounts. This type of program has been especially important during COVID. And remote and hybrid learning isn’t going away, as we know. It’s difficult to foresee a world where hybrid becomes an option instead of a requirement. Folks don’t like options taken away once they’re there. And so, the investment in these types of solutions is going to continue to support future directions. Cloud access especially has become important for institutions to support their students. That’s one area where we have seen a lot of growth in the last year.”

Read more insights from The Quilt’s President and CEO, Jen Leasure.

Download the full Innovation in Education report for more insights from these thought leaders and additional industry research from Campus Technology.

Maximizing the Benefits of MultiCloud

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

The government’s approach to cloud technology has changed dramatically in the years between the 2010 Federal Cloud Computing Strategy, known as Cloud First, and the 2019 Cloud Smart Strategy. The first policy pushed agencies to consider cloud technologies before others, while the second offers actionable advice on how to deploy the technology. Today, 81% of federal agencies use more than one cloud platform, according to a MeriTalk survey. Because of its inherent flexibility and scalability, cloud technology played a key role in agencies’ response to the pandemic and their ability to shift employees to remote work. Now government leaders recognize that multicloud environments are crucial for ensuring resiliency during a crisis. The Cloud Smart Strategy explicitly references hybrid and multicloud environments as essential tools for improving mission outcomes and service delivery. Despite the benefits of multicloud environments, they can present management challenges for many agencies, such as difficulty migrating mission-critical legacy apps to the cloud or ensuring the interoperability of products and services from multiple vendors. In a recent survey of FCW readers, security was the biggest challenge to managing a cloud ecosystem, cited by 74% of respondents. The Cloud Smart Strategy makes it clear that cloud technology has become indispensable to government agencies but adopting hybrid and multicloud requires thoughtfulness and planning; read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government^® report on multicloud.

Empowering the Government’s Earliest Adopters

“Multicloud environments offer agencies the opportunity to go beyond simply managing data to analyzing it for valuable insights and better decision-making. Cloud technology was created to deal with the exponential increase in data collection and the increasing demands for storage. In other words, cloud was developed to handle big-data challenges. Furthermore, cloud technology offers tremendous opportunities for agencies to off-load some monotonous day-to-day IT management tasks in favor of higher-level activities. If there are only a handful of people in an agency’s IT organization, they could spend all their time creating new storage clusters and provisioning that storage as data collection increases. If an agency can leverage the automation that comes with cloud to store and replicate data and then make sure that data is backed up and protected, the agency can enable those individuals to focus on true data analysis, data science and data discovery.”

Read more insights from Google’s Cloud Engineering Manager, Sean Maday.

Rethinking Legacy App Migration and Software Factories

“Many government agencies have started to build software factories to reduce security risks and greatly improve the innovation cycle. If not implemented well, however, they can increase security risks, especially when each program or project builds its own software factory. Instead of creating more software factories, agencies should move toward centralizing software build environments and rationalizing duplicative processes that can be used for both legacy and modern application development teams regardless of their development methodology. They should strive to standardize all tooling for agile/DevSecOps, create enterprise services that support development teams, and establish policies that monitor for insider threat and eliminate risks during software development.”

Read more insights from MFGS’s Public Sector CTO, David Wray, and CTO for Alliances and Partners, Kevin Hansen.

Developing a Long-Term Vision for MultiCloud

“A multicloud approach can be a double-edged sword, with benefits and risks. When agencies have access to a cloud environment, it’s easy for them to spin up new compute resources or storage solutions. But this flexibility opens up risks in terms of performance and security. Even when an agency is working with public cloud service providers, it’s the agency’s responsibility to make sure its resources are configured properly. Many data leakage incidents in the cloud are the result of a configuration issue. Furthermore, in a multicloud environment, technologies are created independently of one another and won’t always work well together. Agencies must make sure they have the appropriate visibility across multicloud environments and on-premises systems so they can understand and manage all aspects of their IT systems. This includes controlling costs and decommissioning purpose-built cloud resources when they are no longer needed.”

Read more insights from SolarWinds’s Group Vice President for Product, Brandon Shopp.

Taking a Fresh Look at Cloud’s Potential

“Agencies need to understand the business goals for a particular cloud-based application or workload and then make decisions about the best architectural approach. They also need a comprehensive security model that’s architecturally coherent from a deployment and operations perspective. The model should take into consideration the entire life cycle of applications as agencies modernize into the cloud. By combining the security and compliance aspects of modernization with a coherent IT architecture, agencies can drive down costs for managing those applications in the cloud. The cost savings can allow agencies to fund further modernization efforts or conduct research and development activities around core workloads or advanced capabilities such as artificial intelligence.”

Read more insights from Microsoft Federal’s CTO, Jason Payne.

How Cloud Storage Enables Innovation

“In the early days, cloud storage was designed to be “cheap and deep” — a place to inexpensively store data without worrying about capacity. At the time, cloud could not compete with on-premises storage in terms of access speeds. Thanks to technological advances in the past several years, however, data is as quickly accessible and available in the cloud as it is via on-premises systems. As a result, the number of applications that are eligible for cloud storage has increased dramatically, and cloud has become a primary storage option for enterprises. Beyond backing up data, agencies can use live applications in the cloud for video surveillance or active archiving, for example.”

Read more insights from Wasabi Technologies’ Senior Director of Product Marketing, David Boland.

Raising MultiCloud Management to the Next Level

“Many agencies are using cloud the way they used non-cloud data centers 15 or 20 years ago. But instead of customizing their cloud environments, they should use tools like Terraform, Juju or Pulumi to create, deploy and manage infrastructure as code on any cloud and then enable automation and orchestration in their cloud platforms. In addition to using predetermined, software-defined configurations for cloud deployments, agencies should develop a more strategic approach to funding their multicloud environments. Agencies should also take a fresh look at their cloud funding models. Beyond the total cost of ownership, they need to reevaluate how they pay for cloud products and services. They can choose to treat that spending as a capital expenditure (CapEx), which typically has a higher cost of ownership, or as an operational expense (OpEx).”

Read more insights from Dell Technologies’ Cloud Technologist, Patrick Thomas.

The Elements of a Strong Cloud Portfolio

“Custom code is arguably the root cause of most IT challenges in government. For example, the Alliance for Digital Innovation, of which Salesforce is a member, released a study that found the federal government could have saved $345 billion over 25 years if it had embraced commercial technology rather than building systems from scratch. In order to improve customer service and reduce their dependency on custom solutions, agencies should implement a multicloud strategy that is not solely based on rehosting and refactoring applications on infrastructure solutions. Agencies need to make sure they adopt a mix of software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And they should consider low-code options within the SaaS and PaaS categories to limit their reliance on custom solutions.”

Read more insights from Salesforce’s Regional Vice President, Public-Sector Digital Strategy, Christopher Radich.

A Framework for Gleaning MultiCloud Insights

“By constantly monitoring compliance, agencies ensure that the cloud environment is safe and productive. In other words, their data is protected and their employees have the ability to use that data to perform their jobs and achieve mission goals. In addition, monitoring compliance and resource optimization is the key to ensuring uptime and appropriate capacity, as well as answering questions about costs. Agencies need to understand how they’re running and operating cloud applications and then make sure they’re applying the right framework for managing security policies. Furthermore, flexibility and efficiency are central benefits of a multicloud environment. Moving on-premises software into such an environment typically requires a complete re-architecting of those applications.”

Read more insights from SAP National Security Services’s CSO, Brian Paget.

Optimizing Cloud Investments with a Digital Twin

“In most agencies, it’s impossible for any person to get an understanding of all traffic flows and behavior. Agencies need access to normalized data presented in easy-to-consume visuals to ensure compliance, reduce outages and prevent incidents. Similarly, multicloud environments incorporate a wide variety of services and products, and it is essential to have a unified view that links what’s in the cloud (or clouds) and what’s on premises. A digital twin can supply that single source of truth and ensure that applications are readable across clouds and on-premises systems and that the network’s security posture is not being invalidated. And just as robust GPS apps will find the most efficient path, a digital twin knows all the possibilities and can answer agencies’ questions about the most efficient, secure and cost-effective way to route cloud activities.”

Read more insights from Forward Networks’s Technical Solutions Architect, Scot Wilson.

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these government multicloud thought leaders and additional industry research from FCW.

Successful Vaccination Strategies Through Sentiment Solutions

Posted on by Quinn Chasan

The relationship between technology and the public sector has never been more pronounced than during the pandemic. As vaccine distribution rolls out across the country, state and local governments turn once more towards technology platforms to tackle the challenges a large-scale operation entails. The rollout of COVID-19 vaccines is a story of two sides – one is the mission side, where healthcare providers and federal agencies work to provide vaccines while understanding the opinions of the public. The other side is IT, as groups who once worked in classic IT environments now find themselves handling both increased user activity on public government websites, as well as larger and faster influxes of data that cannot be contained in a singular database.

In a world in which digital security is vital, balancing both sides safely and effectively requires a system that can handle complex and sudden changes. With cloud-based infrastructure and new solutions, many state and local governments are finding new ways to connect to both communities and agencies, all through the collection and understanding of data.

Putting the Public First

Public health does not exist in a silo — the “public” emphasis is unpredictable, as local communities have varying opinions within a single county or state. Sentiment solutions provide a way of examining the response to vaccine rollout within a community, and aid healthcare providers and federal agencies in anticipating changes to scheduling and administering vaccinations. With a sentiment solution focus, these programs can track the interactions of the public with real-time vaccine sign-ups or chatbots, and keep note of how feelings towards vaccine distribution change in a given area. Vaccine distribution can then be altered based on the feedback from the constituents, providing more vaccines in areas that require them at a faster pace. Having a solution examine the needs of a community and what drives their public health decision-making can prepare agencies in anticipating sentiments, and tailor their approach to vaccine distribution in a way that ultimately benefits the public.

Focus on Analytics

For the IT side of vaccine distribution, the rollout of programs involves working with agencies that would not operate together outside of a disaster situation, such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). With data pouring in from users interacting with government websites, as well as data driven by the mission of vaccine distribution, central IT groups need to rethink methods of shared services that will be utilized between agencies. A cloud-based infrastructure can bridge the gap between these agencies, and provide core infrastructure capabilities to examining and handling the influx of data. Someone engaging with a website chatbot, for example, could provide data that shows they live in a location with many COVID-19 cases and a lack of vaccines. These analytics can be passed to epidemiologists, who can then see the impact on vaccine uptake or areas that require targeting for public health decisions. Not only do multiple agencies benefit from shared data, but CIOs can work within an existing ecosystem with less tools. The seamless integration of solutions such as sentiment solutions allows for focus to be directed towards the bigger picture, understanding the role of data rather than being bogged down in website reports or chatbot data. Data becomes unified, and analytics becomes clearer for all agencies to understand.

Transforming Data for Tomorrow

Having cloud-based infrastructure to manage digital data is not a momentary solution. Constituent voices will still need to be heard long after COVID-19 is dealt with, and IT solutions will not be utilized for a singular function. Implementing these solutions now, even for a singular use case, will keep the infrastructure in place to serve future use cases, as data management increases in complexity and scale. Future implementation can be faster, minimizing operation inefficiency as data pipelines will not have to be built, but can be ready to handle any situation. Such technology can even spread outside of its current deployment in communications and healthcare, to be utilized in areas such as the legal field. These new infrastructures and solutions may be used to help end the spread of COVID-19 through vaccine distribution, but they have the ability to provide a new beginning to managing and understanding both public opinion and data.

View Google’s Virtual Healthcare roundtable event to learn more about using Google Services to deliver data insights and other solutions.

Cloud Technology Addresses the Pandemic’s Social Safety Net Challenges

Posted on by Denise Winkler

The COVID-19 crisis is having a huge impact on social safety net programs at the state and local level. Unemployment offices across the country have been overwhelmed with record numbers of claims; more than 50 million citizens applied for first time unemployment—while food assistance funding has increased by two billion per month and Medicaid enrollment is expected to increase as high as 55 million. At the same time, many states are facing drastic budget shortfalls of more than 20%.

Cloud technology is uniquely positioned to help government agencies deliver critical benefits to citizens as they try to cope with the impact of COVID 19. The legacy systems that support the delivery of social safety net programs are finite–they were never designed to support the volume or flexible enough to spin-up brand new benefit programs on demand. Cloud technology can scale up to petabytes of data in seconds. New modules can be developed in days–not weeks and integrate with back-end legacy systems with no equipment.

The pandemic has demonstrated the value of cloud technology to state and local agencies and its unique capability to address the wide variety of problems government agencies now face.

Volume

Unemployment applications have been over 1 million a week for the last 22 out of 23 weeks. To put this in context the previous highest peak was 700,000 per week during the 2008-9 recession. Agency unemployment portals are overwhelmed: slowing to a crawl or crashing.

One cloud technology solution is a virtual waiting room which can be placed in front of an agency’s website. It lists FAQs addressing common concerns while providing a clock informing individuals about their wait times. This throttles information flow and shields the website from crashing. More importantly, it calms anxious citizens and reduces traffic to both the portal and call centers.

Another solution is virtual agents, artificial intelligence (AI) technology that can quickly learn respond to common questions or complete routine tasks. Virtual agents can be used on websites or in call centers, reducing call volumes and freeing up human agents for more complex tasks.

The Illinois Department of Economic Security, for example, received over a million applications in 10 weeks. IDES’s website traffic spiked from 50,000 page views per day to millions. In two weeks, we implemented a scalable virtual assistant and trained it to answer frequently asked questions. In the first two weeks that virtual agent responded with 90% accuracy to 3.2 million inquiries.

Adapting to Changes in the Programs

Many agencies are also grappling with administering new legislation, such as Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, or significant changes to existing programs.Compounding the problem is that most of these programs are heavily dependent on paper documents. A typical benefit application might be 6 or more pages that must be processed.

However, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) can automate up to 80% of document processing, enabling agencies to use their staff for higher touch activities that require human intervention. The process digitizes paper documents automates data extraction–even from handwritten or typed applications, ingests the data into the core case management system—while providing real time reporting on how many applications are in process.

Cloud technology can also support rapid application development. For example: The New York Department of Labor was facing a 1000% increase in unemployment applications and did not have the ability to take applications for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA). They utilized cloud technology to quickly develop a brand new application that took 100K applications in the first 24 hours and 1.2M applications as of the end of May. This efficiency modernized their front-end in a matter of weeks.

Virtual Engagement

Social distancing and shelter in place orders have forced businesses and government agencies to quickly rethink the workplace and service delivery. Staff in social safety net agencies traditionally work in the office supporting required face-to-face interactions with citizens. Literally overnight, these agencies had to not only enable a remote workforce but enable virtual citizen interaction and service delivery.

Cloud technology enabled staff to collaborate–to share and work simultaneously on documents, schedule virtual team meetings, conduct virtual client interviews and so on. Government agencies have more individuals working remotely and delivering virtual services than ever before. The transition to cloud and virtual service delivery has been so successful and cost-effective that some states are now considering closing brick-and-mortar offices.

One example of virtual engagement is that child welfare caseworkers can organize virtual team meetings, including the child, foster and birth parents, therapist, and any other key individuals to review the case plan every 90 days. Likewise, if a child welfare report comes from a doctor or teacher, investigators can meet with the reporter by video conference rather than driving to meet them. The cloud saves travel time, shortens the process overall, and allows everything to be recorded and documented. Many federal and state policies have been temporarily suspended or changed to support virtual engagement during the pandemic. For example, allowing virtual visits with children in foster care; or suspending required face-to-face interviews with SNAP applicants. It will be interesting to see if these changes will remain permanent or evolve to support virtual engagement.

Re-Opening and Recovery

Cloud solutions also have a role to play in helping states recover and re-open their economies. Massive quantities of unemployed citizens will not automatically return to work; they will need assistance finding jobs.

With cloud solutions, governments can quickly implement virtual career centers to help citizens draft and post resumes, get career counseling, and attend virtual job fairs and virtual interviews—while AI can help match citizens to jobs. This will enable unemployment offices to monitor beneficiaries’ job searches as well.

Businesses in the private sector are learning that the cloud can enable new efficiencies, but it is equally true that it can enable the vital missions of state and local governments. After all, we’re all in this together.

Check out our On-Demand Webinar to learn tips and solutions for better social services technology, how technology and Google Cloud can improve citizen outcomes based on current trends, and more.

Three Ways AI Can Optimize Your Agency’s Call Center

Posted on by Brad Hoffman and Chris Hein

The COVID-19 pandemic has stretched some government agencies and programs to their limits as they strive to provide resources, financial aid, and general guidance to citizens during this unprecedented time. The increase in reliance on government aid, combined with uncertainty and confusion about new and old assistance programs alike, has led to an influx of customer service calls on an unprecedented scale.

Federal, state, and local government agencies are having to field thousands of additional calls each day, leading to eye-catching headlines of individuals calling in 300 times a day with no answer, or spending hours on hold only to have their call dropped, desperate for information about unemployment benefits or other critical social safety nets. As agencies scramble to increase their call capacity, they are facing the reality they can’t scale up to properly handle the surge in call numbers. For example, if a call center can normally handle up to 3,000 calls a day and had already doubled their staff, they still aren’t coming anywhere close to managing 200,000 daily calls—and those 195,000 calls that did not get answered one day are going to keep calling back until they can reach someone, further overloading the phone lines.

The new ultra-high call volumes have positioned government agencies to seek out solutions that, in the past, were only available to large customer-facing companies in insurance, banking and telecommunications. Call center automation has traditionally been a costly investment that is difficult to scale and requires overhauls of entire systems—all significant barriers for government agencies.

Due to the growth in voice-to-text technology, combined with artificial intelligence capabilities, cloud-based contact center solutions have become more affordable, accessible, and scalable—and government agencies are taking notice.

Understand Callers’ Top Needs

The first step to achieving a more capable response to the influx of calls is identifying the most common needs through data. Since some government call centers are only able to respond to a fraction of calls, they are unable to see the full picture of what people need. An AI-powered system can screen the calls and gather data on what people need the most help with, allowing the call center to shape their response more effectively.

This requires the technology to be able to understand what callers are asking for using natural language processing that can take what callers are saying and turn it into text that is captured for review. Natural language processing is also critical to understanding the different ways callers might ask the same question. Once a call center has gleaned data about the most pressing needs from all callers—not just the ones who manage to get through to a live agent—it can easily program how the automated program should answer those frequent questions.

Streamline Assistance on Multiple Channels

Once the AI platform is programmed to handle callers’ most pressing needs, it can address those issues through multiple channels. Some government websites can be difficult to navigate or provide outdated information, which is driving people to call for help in the first place. The AI-driven contact center—armed with the same intelligence about common customer needs—can also be deployed through email or a web interface to effortlessly answer questions and cut down on calls with minimal additional configuration.

After establishing the basic virtual agent that can assist with top needs, AI-based call center platforms can move beyond answering questions and take action through an authentication system. For example, if a customer is calling in to report an exposure to someone with COVID-19, the automated system can log their symptoms, track that information, and set up a follow-up call with a public health official as needed. The technology can also be integrated into older, antiquated systems, such as automatically looking up the status of unemployment claims for callers.

Prepare for What’s Next

Unlike legacy call center software, cloud-based AI call center technology can easily be scaled up or down depending on the need. As rent, unemployment, and paycheck programs continue to evolve with the pandemic, calls will ebb and flow—requests for loans may decline, for example, but calls to public power utilities to inquire about bill assistance may increase. And when the call volume drops back down to normal, the solution can be right-sized to continue benefiting agencies with AI assistance without paying for the large scale services when not required.

This type of flexible solution can also be expanded to more holistically address and update the current customer service architecture of government agencies. Agencies can more easily explore how to service their constituents in the fastest, most efficient way possible, and begin that buildout with the cloud-based platform to prepare for whatever the future holds.

Looking to learn more? Access our On-Demand Webinar as we discuss how agencies are turning to technology to scale their constituent communications to aid their populations in a time of need.

Building a More Secure Cloud

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

Government officials nationwide had to accelerate modernization initiatives to ensure that teleworking employees could access networks and data from remote locations. For many agencies, that meant a higher reliance on cloud technology and a possible expansion of their cybersecurity vulnerabilities in an environment already attractive to hackers. In response to the security challenges raised by the cloud, the federal government has provided myriad foundational documents, guidelines and strategies to help agencies create a strong security posture, including the Cloud Smart strategy and Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). Cloud technology has a crucial role to play in agencies’ ability to modernize IT systems and take advantage of the latest technological innovations. Given this importance, cloud adoption must keep pace with security efforts. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in government cloud security and FedRAMP in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government^® report.

Cloud and the Customer Experience

“The emphasis on user-centered design is changing the way applications are created. In the past, many government applications were built from the perspective of the agency rather than from the perspective of the end user. The flexible, innovative nature of cloud technology makes it easier for agencies to improve the efficacy of their applications and what they ultimately deliver. In addition, cloud technologies can help agencies start getting a 360-degree view of how they interact with citizens, business partners and other agencies and even begin personalizing those experiences. In addition, software that manages, authenticates and verifies people’s credentials can ensure privacy while streamlining the customer experience. IDEA codifies the use of secure credentials across platforms and therefore will accelerate the use of trusted credentials in multiple environments so that people will be even more willing to conduct online transactions with the government.”

Read more insights from Acquia’s Vice President of Federal Sector, Peter Durand.

Why MultiCloud and Zero Trust Are Now Essential

“The coronavirus pandemic has underscored the government’s need to offer a secure cloud environment that allows employees to access their data and applications anywhere, anytime and at virtually infinite scale. Many agencies found themselves unprepared to support the sudden move to telework in response to the pandemic. Some didn’t have enough VPNs or smart-card readers for their employees’ remote devices, for example. Google Cloud customers that were already using G Suite or Cloud Identity were able to make the transition to telework smoothly without the need for VPNs or other special technology. That was due in part to G Suite’s reliance on a zero trust architecture, which shifts access control from the network’s perimeter to individual users and devices.”

Read more insights from Google Cloud’s Director of Federal, Shannon Sullivan.

The Route to Secure, Fast Cloud Adoption

“SASE and CNAP pull together a number of different technologies and categories. But those are point-in-time definitions. Technologies evolve and their functions change over time, so rather than think about what category of product they need, agencies should focus on what they’re trying to accomplish and the business outcomes they want to achieve. Agencies should look for a platform that was built natively in the cloud. It should apply persistent protection to sensitive information no matter where it goes; offer complete visibility into data, context and user behavior across the entire environment; and take real-time action to correct policy violations and stop security threats.”

Read more insights from McAfee’s Senior Vice President of the Cloud Security Business Unit, Rajiv Gupta.

Cloud Security Considerations for DOD Mission Partners

“Moving to the cloud requires a considerable level of effort and expense. Ensuring the security of applications or services running in a cloud adds another layer of complexity. When choosing a cloud service provider, organizations need to understand what security controls they will effectively inherit from that provider and what controls they will have to build and deploy on their own. For government agencies, FedRAMP provides a host of security levels and a robust number of security controls in a well-documented package, but Defense Department agencies also need to understand if they have any additional impact-level requirements for their applications and mission-critical data. As mission partners move to the cloud, they need to make sure that approved cloud providers can meet those baseline security and impact-level requirements.”

Read more insights from GDIT’s milCloud® 2.0 Cloud Services Portfolio Lead, Jeffrey Phelan.

The Evolution of Trusted Connections

“Under TIC 3.0, agencies can still use network proxies, cloud access security brokers, and security information and event management (SIEM) tools to build a strong security framework, but they don’t have to run everything through a TIC. And users don’t have to struggle with increased latency and network complexity. Instead, the end-user experience is streamlined because cloud-native tools are handling processes and workloads. Agencies end up with a clean omnichannel experience for employees because their location no longer matters. Whether they are working on an iPad at home or a desktop computer at a government office, the security level and user experience are the same.”

Read more insights from Okta’s Solution Engineer, Habib Hourani.

Cloud: One Size Does Not Fit All

“Cloud is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, finding the right fit depends on knowing agencies’ customers, the type of information they’re processing and their user base. Then it’s a question of aligning what the customer needs with the cloud offerings that are available. FedRAMP has been very successful at making that fit easier. The program brings transparency and consistency to the government’s use of cloud technology. Agencies know that an authorized company’s product or service has been rigorously reviewed under FedRAMP and that the government’s continuous monitoring program will provide information about how vulnerabilities are mitigated during the term of service.

Read more insights from SAP National Security Services’ Vice President and CISO, Ted Wagner.

How Cloud Makes Telework Smarter

“Smartsheet Gov enables employees to complete tasks more easily, efficiently and securely by working with systems on an automated or integrated basis. In addition, employees can access Smartsheet from wherever they are. They can share information and the results of their work via dashboards that multiple employees can view at one time and continue that seamless collaboration with their colleagues even when everyone is working from home. Smartsheet datasets are housed in a secure, FedRAMP-authorized cloud environment, which assures agencies that they can adhere to the same security protocols from outside the office. For example, if an agency needs to conduct a yearly audit that would normally take place with all the participants at a physical location, they can do the work remotely using Smartsheet Gov to run the same playbook, the same audit and the same workflow regardless of where those employees reside. Such borderless teams can reduce costs while increasing employee satisfaction and productivity.”

Read more insights from Smartsheet’s Vice President of Security, Risk and Compliance, Ignacio Martinez.

Visibility is Essential for Cloud Security

“The nature of an agency’s mission, data protection needs and other requirements suggest that multi-cloud and hybrid environments will be the norm. As we migrate to these new locales, there is an exponential deluge of data scattered across multiple systems and endpoints. It is critical that agencies have granular visibility into all the devices, workloads and applications running across these environments so that they can gain operational and security insights. The fidelity of data is another crucial factor because without it any technology has its limits and decisions may not ensure successful outcomes. To allay any fears about security, FedRAMP, a standardized framework for security assessments, was introduced. It has grown to be the gold standard for cloud security today.

Read more insights from Splunk’s Director of Industry Marketing for Public Sector and Education, Ashok Sankar.

How the Cloud is Redefining Security

“The Trusted Internet Connections Initiative was created in 2007 after the Office of Management and Budget conducted a study that found thousands of unprotected internet connections at agencies. Back then, we were using the internet mainly for email and web browsing, so when the government mandated that all internet traffic must go through a trusted connection, it made sense. But over the years, agencies have moved workloads to the cloud, and now employees’ activities rarely travel through an agency’s data center. As a result, TIC became a barrier to cloud adoption. The TIC 3.0 draft guidance, however, is a crucial step toward removing those obstacles.”

Read more insights from Zscaler’s Vice President of Global Government, Stephen Kovac.

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these government cloud security thought leaders and additional industry research from FCW.

Protect your Agency’s Assets With a Security Management System

Posted on by Shujaat Ali

With the proliferation of shadow IT and other cloud services required to run businesses, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to protect a company’s intellectual assets at scale. Fortunately, online security management system make it easier to maintain control of these assets.

Let’s take a look at today’s security realities as well as the necessary elements of an effective security management system.

There’s a Reason Businesses Don’t Feel Secure

Having so many services to manage and maintain complicates efforts to ensure the right controls and policies are in place to keep company IP, data, and customer information secure.

“The average IT organization has to manage 1,427 cloud services.”

– Skyhigh, 2017

Both on-premise and on-the-cloud patchwork systems are becoming tougher to manage and easier for attackers to target. What’s more, hackers are changing tactics all the time. Without an army of security pros, it’s hard to keep up. For example:

91% of attacks start with a phishing email.
66% of malware is installed by malicious emails and attachments.
90% of reported security breaches are caused by employee negligence, extortion and external threats.

By some estimates, there are about 5,000 daily security threat events being generated in security operation centers. On an average day, centers can only reach about 2,500 of these.

Neglecting roughly half of security threat events is simply not good enough. Your company reputation can be irreparably harmed by the loss of critical information. Something as easy as an employee opening an attachment in a malicious email could lead to massive revenue loss.

“30% of data breaches are caused by employees due to a lack of internal controls.”

– Online Trust Alliance, 2016

This is no longer just an admin-level problem. It’s a broad corporate issue.

By creating a security management system, corporations can give admins and users the controls they need to identify and address security threats.

Security Management System Unboxed

Resource-savvy businesses use a security management system to surface the most worrisome security concerns. The center gives them security analytics, actionable insights in a single unified place, and best-practice recommendations.

The smart move? Create a security management system that oversees your employee modules and applications, including individual file sharing, email and IM, and presentation and word processing apps.

The three pillars of a modern security system are as follows:

1. Prevention

Prevention is the key to security health. To maintain it, your management system should help admins improve their security domain by setting rules and configurations to address each vulnerability and keep it from turning into a threat.

This part of the management system displays what security rules have been enabled for which organization. For example, it can show you the number of domains and mobile devices that have enabled email forwarding and two-factor authentication. It reviews such things as:

Email
File sharing
Devices
Users
Instant messaging
Groups

2. Detection

If a vulnerability is discovered, companies want to quickly get to the information that matters so they can focus on solving issues.

An effective dashboard can alert admins and IT decision makers to suspicious device activity, demonstrate how spam and malware are targeting organization users, and deliver security effectiveness metrics. It also alerts admins to which users are being targeted by phishing to help head off a potential attack.

Security dashboards should detect and give insights to:

File exposure
Authentication
Encryption
Email delivery
Spam and malware classification
User perception

3. Remediation

And lastly, you need remediation capabilities that allow analysts and admins to investigate and research a particular security threat and remediate it in real time.

If you find an issue you need to address, your system should provide recommendations for how to remediate or change a troublesome configuration.

You Need Information, Not an Army

A security management system can significantly increase the effectiveness of your existing admin team, decrease the level of employee-caused data breaches, and protect your company’s sensitive information.

Want to learn more? Click here to access our on-demand actionable security insights for G Suite webinar.

Three Steps to Modernize Your Data Warehouse

Posted on by Karteek Kotamsetty

The significant growth of the amount of data produced by organizations has driven data governance initiatives across the country—a trend that has revealed the need for operational efficiency when handling large amounts of data. There is no shortage of products to address this new challenge, but not all solutions are created equal.

Not only do organizations want a solution for efficiently storing and managing databases, they want a faster and more capable way to get insights from that data. Right now, legacy data storage solutions do not have the structure or security needed to efficiently glean insights from the information they store. A serverless model allows for both scalable storage and efficient data analytics capabilities—a platform where an entire use case or initiatives can be implemented in a matter of seconds. This type of operational model essentially reduces both the cost of running such a platform and the operational overhead, creating a smaller infrastructure footprint.

As organizations seek to organize and analyze their data, understanding the risk management and decision making involved in big data management is critical for compliance and optimizing control over the data. Continue reading →

Leveraging Cloud Platforms to Enhance Cybersecurity and Data Management

Posted on by Michael Storrs

Cyberattacks have become a common occurrence for organizations around the world, affecting everyone from small nonprofits to entire cities. The U.S. government is no stranger to such attacks—two years ago, one state agency estimated they were receiving approximately 150 million attacks per day, and that number is estimated to have doubled over the past two years. The average cost per security incident for a public sector organization is $2.3 million—and that doesn’t include the ramifications on national security, citizen services, or the national economy.

Fortunately, many government agencies are responding to the rising threat by expanding their IT and security services to audit, log, and detect attempted cyberattacks on devices and systems. By gathering logs, organizations can query the data and get a better picture of a potential attack. Continue reading →