Managing identities and access across Microsoft Entra ID, Google Cloud, and AWS is a growing challenge for government agencies at all levels. Distributing agencies’ application infrastructure and workloads among different clouds has benefits, such as greater resilience, targeted cost management, and greater flexibility in the future by avoiding lock-in with one provider. But the benefits carry their own drawbacks, including the need to m...

The goal of digital transformation is to streamline agency operations while increasing customer satisfaction. Achieving that goal requires planning up front, however – if there isn’t a clear objective it is easy to get off track, and cutting corners on execution to make up time can be tempting. For instance, the third-party contractors often used by agencies want to set themselves up for success, so they should receive guidance on...

Migrating to the cloud is not simple, especially if an agency wants to establish a multi-cloud environment that can support a growing number of apps and a wide range of services. Migration requires eliminating IT silos, a unified management and control system, automation of tasks, being able to extend and migrate apps and data in all the clouds in use, and more. Solutions have emerged that aim to simplify administration, improve resilience, an...

Zero Trust (ZT) is a cybersecurity framework that automates an organization’s security architecture and orchestrates a response as soon as systems are attacked. This is why ZT is the core of “Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity,” the Executive Order issued in May 2021 requiring agencies to implement a zero trust architecture for their IT systems. The challenge, however, lies in implementing a complete solution guided b...

As the upcoming elections approach, the integrity of our electoral systems is under greater scrutiny than ever before. Election security professionals are on the front lines, tasked with the critical mission of safeguarding the technology that underpins our democracy. But trust in elections continues to decline. Election officials all around the country are taking extraordinary steps to reassure the public that election results are secure and...

The federal government has been implementing variations on a cloud strategy since at least 2011, when President Obama introduced a call for “cloud-first” solutions. Since then, cloud has become something of a de facto standard for agencies looking to transform their IT operations, thanks to the General Services Administration’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). FedRAMP’s three primary goals ar...

Executive Order 14028 mandates agencies implement zero trust (ZT) architectures for all cyber networks. Zero trust relies on a full understanding of the cyber attack surface in order to move the boundary closer to the user and secure each component. After all, you can’t secure what you don’t know you have. Many agencies are still struggling to answer simple questions: What devices have access to our environments? Is the core softwa...

It has been one year since the issuance of the Executive Order on AI, and the landscape continues to evolve rapidly. Federal agencies have been hard at work gaining mission-oriented outcomes from pilots, while trying to identify and navigate through the challenges of operationalizing AI at scale. For many departments, the leap into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) may seem like a bridge too far. Even those with well-resourced data sys...

The rise of artificial intelligence has led agencies to seek out hybrid cloud infrastructure that accelerates AI application development and delivers faster time to value. AI solutions also have varying storage requirements based on their design – another reason that hybrid cloud solutions can optimize AI applications. At the same time, hybrid cloud environments create complexities that must be managed, ranging from ensuring that hybrid...

Government agencies at all levels are under pressure to modernize their IT infrastructure to meet the evolving needs and expectations of their customers, stakeholders, and employees. The ubiquity of smart phones and tailored apps in the broader world have raised user expectations for government systems to work the same way. Modernization certainly presents a host of opportunities to improve agencies’ performance, but it comes with its ow...