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Federal agencies have invested billions in cloud modernization, yet many still struggle to understand exactly what they are paying for. A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found widespread cloud cost overruns caused by duplicated services, idle “zombie” workloads, and limited visibility into unit-level economics. At the same time, the Office of Management and Budget is increasing pressure on agencies to demonstrate fiscal accountability and align cloud investments with mission outcomes. IBM’s FinOps portfolio—including Apptio, Cloudability, Turbonomic, and Kubecost—provides a unified financial control plane that connects cloud spending to workloads, teams, and mission outcomes. By delivering real-time cost transparency and AI-driven optimization, agencies can reduce cloud waste, strengthen financial governance, and build the visibility leadership needs to sustain modernization funding.

The federal government manages more than 300,000 buildings and structures, yet deferred maintenance backlogs have surpassed $370 billion due to aging infrastructure and fragmented asset data. Facility managers often rely on disconnected systems for maintenance records, compliance tracking, and inventory management, forcing agencies into costly reactive repair cycles rather than predictive planning. IBM Maximo Application Suite addresses these challenges by unifying asset lifecycle management with AI-driven predictive maintenance and IoT-enabled condition monitoring in a FedRAMP-ready platform. With its upcoming SaaS offering for federal environments, Maximo enables agencies to shift from reactive break-fix operations to data-driven, condition-based maintenance that improves reliability, reduces downtime, and lowers total cost of ownership.

Credential compromise remains the root cause of most federal cyber breaches, yet many agencies still depend on fragmented identity systems, inconsistent MFA enforcement, and legacy applications that cannot support modern authentication. These gaps persist even as Office of Management and Budget and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency push agencies to adopt phishing-resistant MFA and continuous identity validation as part of Zero Trust architecture. IBM Verify addresses this challenge by delivering an adaptive identity platform that unifies authentication, access governance, and risk-based access controls across hybrid environments. With AI-driven anomaly detection, context-aware adaptive MFA, and deep ICAM integration, IBM Verify enables agencies to evaluate identity risk in real time, strengthen access assurance, and significantly reduce credential-based threats.