The Best of What’s New in Automation

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the conversation surrounding automation in government featured a lot of skepticism. For some, automation seemed too difficult or risky to implement. For others, it represented a threat to human workers. And for many, change in general is hard to embrace because it means leaving behind the familiar and venturing toward the unknown. But when COVID-19 infection rates skyrocketed, and when programs like unemployment insurance (UI) faced unprecedented spikes in demand, governments felt compelled to consider and adopt technologies they may have once resisted. And so, in 2022, the dialogue on automation has a much different tone. The focus has shifted toward identifying opportunities, challenges and best practices so that agencies can figure out where automation fits best. Learn how your agency or municipality can take full advantage of the growing momentum behind automation in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Modernizing Expense and Payment Management

“When you have an automated system, if someone is about to do something that is noncompliant, the system flags them. Depending on how an organization sets policy, the system can stop the employee completely or allow the spend to proceed but with a warning that the behavior is out of compliance and will be flagged. That impacts how people make their buying decisions. As part of auditing overall, AI, ML and other technologies also work together to detect abnormal or potentially fraudulent behavior. Continual noncompliant behavior is tracked, marked and reported on. In terms of decision-making, intelligent automated solutions give organizations actionable data—sometimes for the first time ever. Organizations can see where they are in their cash flow, their debts, and so on and use that data to make decisions that drive the business outcomes they need.”

Read more insights from SAP Concur’s senior director for state and local government, Jim McClurkin.

Having an Automation-First Mindset

“Some executives don’t realize how much repetitive work their teams do until we talk to their staff and then show them the power of the possible. The best ideas for automation come from the people doing the work, so simple education is the best way to prepare employees. We partner with organizations to help educate their end users and show them what’s possible. It’s also helpful to use terms like “digital employee” or “digital workforce” rather than the term “bot,” which isn’t always well received. People understand they can have a digital assistant right on their desktop. Adoption is important because state and local governments need digital workers to address their current and future workforce needs, just like the private sector.”

Read more insights from UiPath’s vice president of sales for state, local and education (SLED), Phil Calzadilla.

Getting Intelligent Automation Right

“We’ve seen the most success where there’s initially enough investment to have an impact and get the organization behind it. Projects that are too small often pass below the visibility of executive leadership and tend to die on the vine. At the same time, projects can’t be more than the organization can chew at one time. The Covered California project started in a discrete area around document processing. Over time, they decided to apply analytics to it, and then improve workflows. Eventually, they added robotics to move the data to various systems. It became this very large but modular step-by-step layering in of different levels of automation. All of this resulted in an incredibly robust automation system that handles 50 million records a year and 300,000 processes per month, but it was done judiciously.”

Read more insights from Kofax’s vice president of public sector and federal sales, Jeremy Hogg.

Preparing For a New Wave of Automation

“Based on trends in the federal government, I expect both state and local governments to continue adopting the cloud over the next five to 10 years. As organizations consider new deployments in the cloud, it would be great to start with automation from the beginning. Instead of making it an after-the-fact approach, bake it into the solution from the start. Also, don’t be afraid to try new tools, and don’t be afraid to accept that you might need to get some training for your team. These are new skills, and enablement is valuable from the beginning.”

Read more insights from Cloudera’s principal solutions engineer, Ian Brooks.

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

The Best of What’s New in Mobility

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

Many organizations have already invested significantly in projects that support mobility. The Center for Digital Government (CDG)’s 2021 Digital Cities and Digital Counties Surveys found that on average 85% of city respondents and 75% of county respondents are using location services, native mobile apps and text message/SMS channels. As organizations move forward with mobility, they should consider compute and storage capacity, end-to-end security, service design and delivery, and application rollout. Another important strategy is to have multiple options, so the organization can adjust to cost changes and inflationary pressures that could impact targeted business outcomes. Learn how your agency or municipality can move toward mobility in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Driving Innovation with Mobility

“It comes down to identity and Zero-Trust concepts. Strongly authenticating someone and having confidence in their identity is especially important as organizations work with sensitive or private information. Organizations need to consider how users move through sensitive data from a strong authentication and authorization standpoint. That brings us to Zero- Trust development models. How do you architect to create a safe landing space for people to come in and then traverse into legacy systems where critical information is stored? How do you set up safe, well-orchestrated and known boundaries, so employees and the public don’t have challenges when they try to access data? That’s critical in your systems.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Chief Architect and National Technology Adviser, Kevin Tunks.

Mobilizing Your Enterprise Securely

“The first challenge is education — understanding what mobile app security means; what the risks are; and what tools, techniques and processes should be employed. The second challenge is determining whether to build the program internally or leverage third parties. Setting up your own program and building a security team to do things like continuous testing, penetration testing, security analysis and supply chain risk management is costly and complicated. Most agencies are turning to commercial off-the-shelf packages or managed service providers that scan and vet mobile apps. Doing so provides instant intelligence on what security risks might live in those mobile apps, so organizations can decide whether to allow them.”

Read more insights from NowSecure’s Chief Mobility Officer, Brian Reed.

Addressing Today’s Mobile Threats

“A lot of Zero-Trust conversations today revolve around validating identity and making sure that a person is who they purport to be. However, if their device has a malicious payload when they’re granted network access, then all we’ve really done is identify that they were the source of the attack. We believe that when you validate the person’s identity, you must simultaneously do device attestation to validate the integrity of their device. Only then should the person be granted access to that particular resource or infrastructure. You can’t say you have Zero Trust if you haven’t attested the device. The two go hand-in-hand.”

Read more insights from Zimperium’s Vice President for Public Sector, Jim Kovach.

Moving from Mobile-First to Mobile-Only

“Organizations must secure all devices that process enterprise data. It’s important to look past “industry standard” protections of yesterday and embrace newer technologies that employ AI and machine learning to provide smarter, quicker and lighter-weight ways of protecting assets. In addition, it’s best to implement mobile-first architectures, 5G (as well as the anticipated 6G release) and cloud architectures simultaneously with their non-mobile infrastructure counterparts. Non-negotiables include yearly penetration testing, programs to review and test third-party applications within agency environments, and securing mobile devices as strongly as desktops. It’s also wise to ensure the security posture of cloud environments is equivalent to on-premises environments. Of course, securing data in transit and at rest is essential. Finally, end-to-end security can’t take a back seat to appeasing users’ demands.”

Read more insights from the BlackBerry Sales Engineering team.

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

The Best of What’s New in Cybersecurity

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

In November 2021, federal lawmakers approved dedicated funding for state and local government cybersecurity efforts. The new State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program — included in the massive Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — provides $1 billion for cybersecurity improvements over four years. Then, in March of this year, President Biden signed into law the Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2022. Taken together, these laws point toward significant changes in the nation’s historically decentralized approach to cybersecurity. New cybersecurity legislation is being driven by a threat environment that seemingly grows more menacing by the day. It’s likely that state and local agencies will receive additional federal cybersecurity support going forward, along with greater federal oversight. Learn how your agency or municipality can take full advantage of the increased funding to protect against increasing challenges in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Navigating Security in a Fast-Changing Environment

“Threat actors are constantly devising new attacks and methodologies, so organizations must stay on top of trends and constantly evolve how they build and secure their software supply chain. It isn’t a ‘set it once and you’re good’ kind of thing. President Biden’s executive order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity and some bills going through Congress will help address some of the issues. Among many things, the executive order mandates service providers disclose security incidents or attacks. It’s also important to establish a community where security professionals across the nation can exchange security and threat information. You don’t want to solve these things in a vacuum. We’re stronger as a community than as individual organizations.”

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

User Identities in a Zero-Trust World

“State and local governments — which have become top targets of phishing, data breaches and ransomware attacks — must be able to prevent cybercriminals from accessing all endpoints, including those associated with a distributed workforce. Prior to the pandemic, employees primarily accessed databases, applications and constituent data from within the secured network perimeter of an office. Now users are connecting from their home networks or unknown networks — even cafes — that don’t have the security protections that exist within a physical office. That heightens the need for Zero Trust, which has ‘never trust, always verify’ as a main tenet.”

Read more insights from Keeper Security’s Director of Public Sector Marketing, Hanna Wong.

Secure Collaboration for the Work-from-Anywhere Future

“The first step is to look at your content governance model. What does that content life cycle look like from ingestion or creation to consumption and archive? Compliance must be part of that entire process. Then, it comes down to your platform and tools. Are you selecting a platform like Box, where your entire content repository is unified and ensures compliance from the point of entry to the point of disposition — all while offering a seamless user experience? Or are you signing up for a disparate and disconnected strategy where you are now responsible for tracking and making sure that different data sources are compliant? Content fragmentation, even in the cloud, can introduce unnecessary exposure and a compliance risk.”

Read more insights from Box’s Managing Director for State and Local Government, Murtaza Masood.

What High-Performing Security Organizations Do Differently

“State and local governments are still trying to get a handle on remote access. At the beginning of COVID, most agencies didn’t have a 1:1 ratio of devices to send home with people, so they were forced overnight into a bring-your-own-device support model and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation. In many cases, the VDI implementation wasn’t very secure, nor was it optimal. Now agencies are asking how secure their setup is, and they have to go backward to address that, which can cause some real challenges.”

Read more insights from HPE’s Master Technologist in the Company’s Office of North America CTO, Joe Vidal, and Server Security and Management Solutions Business Manager, Allen Whipple.

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

The Best of What’s New in Government Customer Experience

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

State and local governments faced a perfect storm of challenges at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pandemic response is now driving a more serious commitment to usability, accessibility and equity of government digital services. City and county officials ranked improving constituent experience and engagement as a top priority, trailing only cybersecurity, in the Center for Digital Government’s (CDG) 2021 Digital Cities and Counties surveys. And states ranked expanding and improving access to services as their top priority in CDG’s most recent Digital States Survey conducted in late 2020. Learn how your agency or municipality can adapt to this new environment, including taking advantage of COVID relief funds, modernizing IT infrastructure and expanding broadband in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Empathy Is Key to Exceptional Experience

“Migrating to cloud-based solutions should be a priority for organizations that are still using on-premises systems. As we’ve seen during the pandemic, cloud-native services let organizations respond, support remote work, scale and add new capabilities much more quickly during crisis situations. Gone are the days of hoping the next emergency doesn’t exceed your on-premises or hosted hardware’s capacity. AI and ML use cases will vary by organization, but the end goal is those who are able to use self-service can do so easily, those who opt out or have more complex needs can reach a representative, and representatives have the context they need to engage and resolve issues with empathy.”

Read more insights from Genesys’ Senior Solution Consultant for U.S. Public Sector, Christina Angel.

Digital Workflows That Empower Constituents

“Constituents are looking for a consumer-grade experience when they interact with their state and local governments. They expect government services to meet them where they are — meaning they want omni-channel 24/7 services in a seamless delivery format. They want answers in real time, as well as tools to help them find answers themselves. A great workflow allows rapid delivery of government services with intelligent case routing and automation. It reduces costs by enabling self-service, proactively answering common questions and providing automated service responses. Finally, it provides a single system of government engagement that supports digital transformation efforts to improve overall customer experience.”

Read more insights from ServiceNow’s Global Head of State, Local and Regional Government Solutions, Tom Yeatts, and CTO/Chief Architect of State and Local Government and Higher Education, Chris Dilley.

Modernizing Document Workflows to Improve Service and Equity

“The resident experience has a number of components. The first is engagement. Experiences should be immersive and intuitive and on par with user experiences in private sector companies. The second element is efficiency. The experience on the backend should be as functional as it is beautiful, meaning it reduces errors, optimizes workflows, automates processes and quickly delivers tangible value for the agency. The third aspect is effectiveness. Agencies must be able to measure and evaluate, almost in real time, how effectively they are engaging users and realizing a return on investment, and then adjust accordingly. The final component is trust. Organizations must demonstrate that they can protect mission-critical workflows and satisfy rigorous government and industry standards.”

Read more insights from DocuSign’s Vice President and Global Head of Industries, Michael (MJ) Jackson.

Reinventing the Customer Journey

“It’s listening to people and the frontline employees who serve them. Designers and CX professionals cannot always sit down with customers, but reviewing data through the right platform can make them feel like they are. You need the right technology — including “listening” tools, predictive intelligence, analytics and full closed-loop actioning capabilities — to gain a holistic understanding of your residents’ experiences and take the right actions that drive meaningful impact. Don’t overlook employee experience. Engaged employees are 4.6 times more likely to be customer-centric compared to disengaged employees. Part of engagement is feeling heard and valued. Always-on collaboration tools, where employees can submit and comment on ideas and feedback related to the resident experience, put the people closest to residents at the heart of your CX program and help you build a more resident-centric culture.”

Read more insights from Qualtrics’ Government Industry Advisor, Jill Leyden.

Adapting to New Customer Behaviors and Expectations

“A digital experience platform is an integrated set of technologies that supports the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences. It supports modernization efforts by providing a broad set of solutions for engaging constituents online. The digital world offers many possible touchpoints for residents. Trying to independently solve for each desired touchpoint can lead to a scrambled web of conflicting technologies, but taking a tech-first monolithic approach will lead to disappointing engagement. A digital experience platform offers proven patterns for providing meaningful engagement, while also allowing flexibility to architect each touchpoint according to the organization’s preferences.”

Read more insights from Acquia’s Digital Transformation Leader for Public Sector, Joshua Smith.

Video Teleconferencing Puts Humans at the Center of Interactions

“We’re seeing a lot of success with court applications. One great example is the Texas judiciary, which announced in February 2021 that more than 2,000 state judges had hosted a combined total of more than one million virtual hearings via Zoom since the pandemic began in March 2020. We anticipate courts and justice systems will continue to leverage videoconferencing in lieu of, or in combination with, in-person hearings due to the benefits it brings to witnesses, judges, jurors and other participants. In the social work realm, video teleconferencing helps increase access and care between in-person visits.”

Read more insights from Zoom’s Head of U.S. State and Local Government, Jennifer Chang.

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

The Best of What’s New in Cybersecurity

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

Cybersecurity reached a tipping point in 2021. One big driver is a wave of disruptive attacks — some targeting critical infrastructure and important supply chains — that has put a national spotlight on this long-simmering issue. These attacks are a wake-up call to elected officials and line-of-business leaders regarding the risk presented by growing cybercriminal activity. That call has gone all the way to the Oval Office, where the Biden Administration issued an executive order aimed at shoring up the nation’s cybersecurity through better sharing of threat information, greater adoption of Zero Trust security architectures and secure cloud services, and other measures. The COVID-19 pandemic has been another important driver, turning up the heat on modernizing security approaches and tools in state and local government. Another critical factor: There’s new money available for cybersecurity modernization. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in cybersecurity in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Achieving a Sustainable Cybersecurity Strategy

“The pandemic accelerated trends that were already in motion. Digital innovation increased to meet the need for digital interactions when face-to-face interactions weren’t possible. In addition, the massive shift to working from home impacted risk. When the pandemic hit, most organizations didn’t have all the policies, procedures and tools in place to effectively secure those environments. Another disruptor is the changing geopolitical landscape. Cyber warfare is becoming a mainstream weapon for many nation states. And then there is the explosion of fraud as a service. Attackers are taking advantage of the fact that organizations’ defenses are not ready for remote work and these other changes.”

Read more insights from Cloudera’s Field CTO, Carolyn Duby.

Intelligent, Ubiquitous Security

“Organizations need prevention and visibility on the endpoints themselves because these devices are in varying risk environments and will eventually be connected to the network, if they aren’t already. Very few sizable breaches occur without accessing or compromising an endpoint. Organizations should focus on prevention first and then visibility because the value of visibility lessens if you don’t have the resources to act on what you see. Preventing an attack early is far less expensive and time-consuming than stopping it later. Organizations need to apply a uniform Zero Trust defense strategy across all devices — mobile included — and personnel.”

Read more insights from Blackberry’s Vice President of Global Services Technical Operations, Tony Lee.

Disaster Recovery in the Age of Ransomware

“One reason cloud storage services are succeeding is because they provide high performance at a much lower cost than the large cloud providers. Many hyper-scale cloud storage providers use service tiers where organizations can store certain data “deep and cheap” for governance or compliance reasons. However, data retrieval can take hours or days and data egress fees can be very expensive. By contrast, a high-performance storage service that doesn’t use service tiers offers a better model for organizations that are fighting ransomware and need active data and a fast response time. Cloud storage services also don’t charge a data egress fee — unlike many hyper-scale cloud providers. This means disaster recovery teams can regularly practice restoring their data without paying a fee every time they do so.”

Read more insights from Wasabi’s Director of Product Marketing, Drew Schlussel.

Cybersecurity at Scale

“The first thing to understand is whether you’re going to lift and shift on-premises workloads or have everything cloud native moving forward. Understanding your cloud strategy will inform your security approach. For example, if you’re going to lift and shift a data center where applications are hosted on servers, your workload protection needs to be tuned toward server vulnerabilities, which are very different from vulnerabilities on laptops and desktops. Also, it’s not just endpoints that are vulnerable. The automation or orchestration layer can also be an attack vector. Finally, it’s important to have tools that monitor conformance to your cloud governance standards so you can avoid misconfigurations that expose your environment to attack.”

Read more insights from Trend Micro’s Vice President and General Manager for U.S. Federal Business, Chris Radosh.

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

The Best of What’s New In Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

State and local governments are dramatically expanding their deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), moving the use of these technologies from theoretical to practical. More governments are using AI in the form of machine learning to scour system activity logs to detect suspicious behavior that may signal a cyberattack. Intelligent software can automate this task and perform it at a scale that’s difficult for humans to match. But although states and localities are moving rapidly to take advantage of AI and ML, the first wave of deployments often focused on individual programs or tasks: chatbots, for example, that answer questions about unemployment insurance claims or help utility customers restore service. Broader and deeper use of AI will require governments to rethink traditional data management policies and upskill IT teams. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in artificial intelligence and machine learning in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

From Call Center to ‘Experience’ Center

“Agent assistance is a great example of how AI can improve both the agent experience and the customer experience. An agent assistance solution detects keywords within a spoken or written dialogue, and then uses those keywords to automatically present helpful information to the agent. In the case of new hires or agents who lack subject expertise, this type of solution not only saves time. It provides “training wheels” for the agent until they’re up to speed. AI models like agent assistance can also learn from agent feedback. Agents basically agree or disagree with the information that the AI presents, which helps the AI solution continually refine what it provides based on the context.”

Read more insights from Genesys’s Principal Solution Consultant, Nathan Hamrick.

Why Wait? Simple Strategies Put AI and ML Within Reach

“You don’t have to be a data scientist or develop custom models to be effective. There are very good AI solutions that are purpose built for specific use cases and don’t require customization, such as our Vision AI. I would start there. A software engineer can do what’s needed, and the solution will likely address a lot of the organization’s needs. Over time, software engineers and others can expand their skillset to retrain custom models in lightweight ways for slightly different use cases the generalized AI doesn’t accommodate. For example, Google Cloud’s Auto-ML products can be used by non-data scientists to retrain our best-in-class AI models for more custom use cases. Just remember that the AI solution is only one part of a larger automated processing use case, and organizations need to plan for how AI is going to be incorporated into that bigger process, so it can be used efficiently.”

Read more insights from Google Cloud Public Sector’s Strategic Business Executive, Chris Haas.

Reducing Complexity and Preparing for Success

“Zero trust security is becoming a common expectation for managing access. The basic concept is that the network should not assume any user is trustworthy — regardless of whether they’re outside the network or already in. Organizations using a zero trust approach implement access controls inside and outside the network. Another important tactic is to minimize the number of handoffs. In other words, simplify the network architecture. Nodes — and connections between those nodes — create complexity, and complexity leads to management challenges and greater risk.”

Read more insights from Cloudera’s Senior Manager of Professional Services Strategy, Timur Nersesov.

Building a Human-Centered Foundation for Advanced Analytics

“Organizations often struggle to advance because of legacy processes. It’s important to be open to new thinking and new methodologies to accelerate the maturation process. Many organizations also lack a solid grasp of their strengths and weaknesses regarding analytics. In addition, their processes may be hostage to legacy systems, data silos or poor alignment across enterprise teams. To address these issues, organizations often need to work first on breaking down traditional barriers between data scientists, IT, citizen data scientists, analysts and domain experts. One way to support this is via a unified, human-centered analytics platform. Such a platform augments human capability regardless of one’s technical acumen, which allows everyone to take advantage of geospatial, predictive and ML-based analytic capabilities to collaborate, innovate and solve problems.”

Read more insights from Alteryx’s Vice President of Sales for State and Local Government and Education, Chuck Ellstrom.

Getting the Most from a Next-Generation Contact Center Platform

“AI enables better automation that empowers both end customers and agents through high-quality self-service and agent assistance. Numerous studies have shown that citizens and customers alike prefer self-service channels. Intelligent automation can make those channels much more effective with AI-powered virtual assistants and agents — not just for informational requests, but also for more complex transactions like understanding eligibility or checking claim status. In addition, intelligent automation can help increase agent productivity through things like agent assistance and help new agents become effective faster, which ultimately results in a better citizen experience.”

Read more insights from Talkdesk’s Vice President of Industry and Strategy for Public Sector, John Bastin.

Reimagining Talent Management

“A single platform is uniquely able to provide deep insights at scale. When you can use AI on one side to rationalize job requirements and on the other side to create a capabilities matrix of individual job seekers, you create some very powerful outcomes. So, a talent intelligence platform really becomes foundational to enabling a number of use cases such as dramatically reducing the time to re-employment, minimizing underemployment and reimagining learning and apprenticeship opportunities. And because AI is self-learning, a talent intelligence platform means these outcomes continually improve over time.”

Read more insights from Eightfold AI’s Vice President of Applied AI & Public Sector, Dan Hopkins.

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these AI/ML thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

The Best of What’s New in Hybrid and Remote Work

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, agencies scrambled to expand secure connectivity and acquire mobile devices, but most state and local CIOs say their organizations transitioned relatively easily to working from home on an emergency basis. Now, with COVID-19 cases in the U.S. dropping dramatically and economies reopening, public agencies face a more complicated issue: figuring out where and how state and local government employees will work going forward. A 2020 CDG national survey found almost 75 percent of respondents anticipate hybrid work — where employees work from home at least on a part-time basis — will be their long-term model. The trend is particularly strong at the state level where just 16 percent of respondents anticipate returning to a fully in-person work environment. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in hybrid and remote work in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Modernizing Contact Centers to Enable Remote Work

“To ensure callers have a secure, fluid and reliable customer experience, agencies must maintain diverse channels of communication. Another challenge is ensuring that contact center agents have secure and timely access to their agency’s database, intuitively orchestrated communications and sufficient bandwidth for reliable connectivity. Organizations also need to minimize the learning curve associated with introducing new endpoints such as Bluetooth-enabled headsets, softphones and web real-time communication (WebRTC), which eliminate the need for traditional desk phones and enable workers to use their laptop for voice or digital interactions.”

Read more insights from Genesys’s Senior Solutions Consultant, Ivory Dugar.

The Digital HQ: Flexible, Inclusive and Connected

“What we’ve seen over the past year hasn’t just been about working from home. It’s been working from home during a pandemic. As the pandemic has stretched into its second year, employees are feeling the strain. The data show that even though the work-from-home experience is better than working in the office full time, employee satisfaction with work-life balance has declined and stress and anxiety have increased. A contributing factor to that stress is the pressure to demonstrate productivity. A third of remote workers say they feel pressure to make sure their managers know that they’re working.”

Read more insights from Slack’s Future Forum Senior Relationship Manager, Dave Macnee, and Customer Success Leader for Public Sector, Kevin Carter.

Giving Remote Workers Access to Resources They Need

“Centralized IT management and virtualization technology are critical to manage infrastructure and address changes quickly and at massive scale — whether that’s to patch a vulnerability across all user devices, upgrade applications or deploy additional computing resources. IT can make a change once via software and then distribute it to everyone’s device within minutes with minimal downtime. Software can monitor network traffic and resource utilization in aggregate and then automatically allocate resources as needed so organizations don’t have to invest in higher-performance user devices or purchase more hardware. In addition, organizations can isolate workloads and systems for security or other purposes, meaning multiple workloads and operating systems can run on the same device.”

Read more insights from NVIDIA’s Senior Manager of Public Sector, Chip Carr.

Managing Process and Cultural Change

“It’s projected that 30 to 35 percent of the public sector workforce will remain remote. A lot of these workers will probably be younger. To attract and engage the workforce of the future, you have to keep systems, processes and tools up to date. Younger people run their lives on their phone. If you expect them to submit to completely manual paper-driven processes, you’ll probably never get a chance to hire them, much less retain them. You also have to find out what they need to be successful in a remote environment; show them a path to promotion; and demonstrate that remote, hybrid and on-prem teams are aware of and understand their value to the organization.”

Read more insights from SAP Concur’s Senior Director of Public Sector, Jim McClurkin.

Navigating the New Frontier

“Having more flexibility and removing the location barrier opens up real opportunities, especially when it comes to competing for specialties like IT. Some states prohibit hiring out of state, but organizations can still widen the pool to include candidates beyond their local headquarters. They can recruit candidates who want to reside in areas with a lower cost of living or who don’t have the time to commute, for example. This flexibility also helps attract minorities and women, which in IT work, has been a real challenge.”

Read more insights from CDG Senior Fellow, Peter K. Anderson.

Download the full Innovation in Government® report for more insights from these hybrid and remote work thought leaders and additional industry research from GovTech.

Best of What’s New in Legacy Modernization

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

The pandemic changed the risk equation for state and local governments around technology upgrades. In the past, state and local government CIOs had created orderly multi-year plans to push toward modern technologies, carefully weighing numerous factors and often facing pushback from public officials who didn’t want to fund updates if the old systems were still chugging along. In 2021 – after a vast shift to remote work, the increase in user-friendly digital services, and the innumerable changes to individual agencies brought on by the coronavirus – the modernization of legacy technology is seen through a new lens. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in legacy modernization in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Moving Modernization Forward in Spite of Disruption

“State and local CIOs are dealing with challenges that none of us ever thought they would have to face. The two most important things they can do are to drive automation and focus on hybrid cloud solutions. We all know the cloud is here to stay. We also know that legacy systems will take too long to migrate completely to the cloud. Embracing a hybrid cloud approach around modern solutions, where you can be partly on-prem as well as in the cloud, is going to help drive modernization and help systems become more effective more quickly. The second piece is automation. Automation has come a long way. It allows organizations to re-factor their workforce into their mission while automating simpler tasks. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are part of this and will become increasingly important as state and local leaders look to improve responsiveness and citizen engagement — both now and in the future.”

Read more insights Red Hat’s Vice President of State and Local Government and Education, Nancy Bohannan.

It All Starts with Collaboration

“A DevSecOps approach takes DevOps culture and methodologies and incorporates security from the very beginning. This brings enormous value to legacy modernization efforts. Many legacy systems were built using waterfall methodologies. That means they may not be regularly scanned for vulnerabilities or they were simply not built to handle modern scale. DevSecOps helps you avoid these issues. First, you will be more agile, as we’ve seen with DevOps. Second, you will build systems that are inherently more secure. Instead of thinking about security after a system is built and in production, you are doing so from day zero and doing so continuously even after you’ve “shipped” it. This is especially critical in cloud environments where shared resources and multi-tenancy are the norm rather than the exception.”

Read more insights from Atlassian’s State and Local Manager, Shayla Sander, and Solutions Engineer, Ken Urban.

Finding Opportunities for Modernization

“The pandemic pushed most organizations into firefighting mode. They don’t have the luxury of doing wholesale rewrites of legacy software, which often take years. At the same time, organizations need to make these systems more efficient in order to serve constituents and improve operations — especially during the pandemic. Instead of replacing systems, organizations are augmenting them by putting new technologies on the front end. These efforts solve some of the immediate problems; however, many legacy challenges remain because organizations just haven’t had time or resources to do the rewrites.”

Read more insights from Dell Technologies’ Chief Strategist and Innovation Officer, Tony Powell.

Contact Center Modernization: Raising the Bar on Customer Service

“Modernizing how you serve citizens should be a continuous process. Methods of communication change. Technology improves. A pandemic exposes weakness in an entire process. And all of these things must be addressed in the context of resource constraints. Organizations should look across their constituency and current platform and ask questions such as: Are we communicating effectively? Do we have the necessary tools to properly manage resources? Do we have a business continuity plan? Is owning and managing technology the best use of our resources? Regardless of the question, the key is to be proactive in your evaluations.”

Read more insights from Genesys’s Director of Solution Consulting for the North American Public Sector, Chad Cole.

4 Tips for Advancing IT Procurement

“Identifying and analyzing potential risks upfront can give jurisdictions more options to address urgent IT needs when a crisis hits, Paneque says. ‘Through a risk assessment you can delineate potential scenarios you might face in the future and where you can substantiate an emergency procurement to stabilize them,’ says Paneque. ‘Later, you can roll that approach into less urgent kinds of requirements that can either be sourced through existing contracts or with typical methods of procurement like an RFP.’”

Read more insights from former New York State Chief Procurement Officer, Sergio Paneque.

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

Best of What’s New In Law Enforcement

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

In July, USA Today reported that the combination of pandemic-induced economic woes and the national movement to “defund the police” could lead to the biggest budget cuts for law enforcement agencies since the Great Recession of 2008. For police departments facing growing demands and tightening budgets, using technology to increase the impact of existing staff and resources will be a game changer. Luckily, autonomous technologies, better connectivity, and more sophisticated video and surveillance analytics tools are available to fill in the gaps. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in law enforcement in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government® report.

Managing Cyber Exposure in Law Enforcement

“A law enforcement agency can face a variety of issues. It may need to address issues related to who has access to what information based on their role. It may need to segment its network — for example, to separate CJIS lookups from other areas that are open to the public. Law enforcement organizations may also be connected to other municipal departments such as the Department of Public Works or even other departments outside the municipality. Addressing these potential attack vectors requires security expertise, which in many cases is not on the agency’s priority list or in its budget. As a result, these agencies become even more susceptible to attack.”

Read more insights Tenable’s Senior Director of Marketing, Michael Rothschild.

Using Blockchain Analysis to Fight Crime

“It comes down to having the right data and making it actionable. Specifically, law enforcement should be interested in a partner with data attributing services, which attribute addresses to the clusters — that is, the entities — that control them. In this case, that would be cluster associated with criminal activity and their cashout points. The historical data behind this capability is an important differentiator. Chainalysis is the only company that has systematically collected information that links real-world entities to blockchain transactions since 2014. This allows the software to accurately distinguish different clusters of entities and attribute more data than can be seen on the blockchain.”

Read more insights from Chainalysis’s Director of Market Development, Don Spies.

Cloud: The IT Force Multiplier

“Storing, managing and effectively using an ever-increasing volume of digital data presents multiple challenges. Buying and maintaining hardware for data storage is expensive and challenging and diverts resources from the core mission of public safety. Then, agencies must manage stored data so it is discoverable, retrievable and in compliance with legally mandated retention policies. Without a sound digital evidence management solution and automated life cycle retention solutions, data management is nearly impossible. Finally, because data is produced in multiple systems, integrating and normalizing that data so it can be searched, analyzed and shared is challenging. Without a strong data management approach and systems, agencies must access multiple systems to discover data that is in different formats, making it very difficult to integrate and gain insights from that information.”

Read more insights from Amazon Web Services’s Public Strategy Lead, Ryan Reynolds.

Supporting the Law Enforcement Community During COVID-19 and Beyond

“COVID-19 created an unprecedented urgency for state, county and municipal workers to operate remotely whenever possible. This caught many agencies by surprise. Although these organizations moved with commendable speed to equip staff to work from home, the needs of the public only increased. Law enforcement agencies had to quickly adapt to the dangers of a pandemic amid calls for police reforms. These officials had to balance protecting the public, themselves and their colleagues in an ever-changing environment. Many departments have come to appreciate how technology enabled them to address these critical priorities.”

Read more insights from the Director of the Law Enforcement Team at Carahsoft, Lacey Wean.

Technology is Key to More Efficient and Effective Law Enforcement

“The pandemic decreased proactive activities. There are fewer cases where an officer might stop you for speeding 10 mph over the speed limit, for example. Departments have to weigh whether it’s worth the risk to stop a car to issue a traffic ticket and potentially be exposed to COVID-19, or to reserve their exposure time for things that are a matter of life or death. The impact of that is reduced revenue generation. COVID-19 also impacted morale. More law enforcement personnel have died from COVID-19 this year than have died in the line of duty. That impacts a police department and its morale — people work longer shifts, and health often suffers.”

Read more insights from the former Senior Adviser for the U.S. State Department’s Antiterrorism Assistance Program and Senior Law Enforcement Adviser for the 2012 Republican National Convention, Morgan Wright.

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

Best of What’s New in Cloud Computing

Posted on by The Carahsoft Team

This may be a make-or-break moment for jurisdictions newly converted to the cloud. As state and local governments scrambled to respond to new COVID-driven requirements, cloud-based contact center platforms, chatbots and web portals helped multiple states and localities quickly scale capacity for unemployment insurance and social services programs. In addition, cloud-hosted video collaboration platforms helped agencies shift employees to remote work on the fly and virtualize public meetings. IT leaders must now evaluate and rationalize the multiple cloud solutions they adopted so quickly. Now is also the time to look at cost optimization for cloud solutions. The COVID response has showcased real-world benefits of the cloud — and that experience is likely to accelerate a trend that was already underway as governments focus more attention on modernizing old systems and applications in the wake of the pandemic. Read the latest insights from industry thought leaders in cloud in Carahsoft’s Innovation in Government^® report.

Cloud Migration as a Path to Modernization

“While there may be an increase in initial costs associated with modernizing legacy technology, the economics strongly indicate that maintaining dated infrastructure is more expensive in the long term. The biggest hurdle organizations face when migrating to the cloud is unpredictable costs. The cloud offers tools and resources to optimize investments and plan for the costs associated with migration. In addition, properly planning your move to the cloud helps agencies accurately budget for such a transition. When they do this correctly with the guidance of a strong partner, state and local governments see significant cost savings.”

Read more insights from the Partner Development Manager for Carahsoft’s AWS Team, Sehar Wahla, and the Sales Director for Carahsoft’s AWS Team, Tina Chiao.

How Does Evolving Cloud Adoption Impact Security?

“One approach is to standardize processes — think NIST or MITRE — so you have a common framework and language for measuring things like risk and attacks. That helps normalize the differences between cloud and traditional security so security teams can better understand what a risk actually means in a cloud environment. On the technology side, traditional threat profiling needs to move beyond the viruses and ransomware conversation and move toward user and entity behavior management, which looks at how users normally access and use an application. Organizations also need to articulate how separate applications securely exchange data for things like enterprise analytics. This is a nascent use case, but it has implications for critical systems where data integrity is important.”

Read more insights from McAfee’s Chief Technology Strategist, Sumit Sehgal.

“The biggest challenges include security, cost, having the technical expertise to successfully migrate into these hybrid environments and understanding which applications are best suited to run there. Organizations often spend a lot of time and money and introduce security vulnerabilities because they try to move applications that are not designed to run in a cloud environment. With the pandemic, organizations are under pressure to rapidly move their workforce into cloud environments. There can be a tendency to cut corners to save time, but these sacrifices can also create vulnerabilities.”

Read more insights from SAP NS2’s EVP of Software Development, Bryce Petty.

Paving the Way with Open Source

“There’s a realization that the cloud isn’t a silver bullet and that to be successful, organizations need to look at cloud adoption holistically. They need to take best practices into account when it comes to securing the environment, training and enabling staff, and even engaging in the procurement process. Open source supports a cloud smart strategy by helping eliminate vendor lock-in risk and technical debt. By using open source technology and an open source cultural process — where there’s transparency, collaboration and the ability to iterate quickly — organizations can solve their business problems and adapt their requirements based on emerging best practices. They’re not beholden to proprietary systems that may create friction for innovation and are potentially costly to replace, upgrade or move to the cloud.”

Read more insights from Red Hat’s Emerging Technology Lead, Frank DiMuzio.

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