IT modernization is imperative to an agile, productive, citizen-centric, and cost-efficient government. It’s also codified as a key objective of many mandates and guidelines. But as mission-critical as IT modernization initiatives are, they are also fraught with risk and operational challenges, including: To overcome these barriers to streamlined IT operations, government leaders should rely on artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps).

Cloud storage solutions can provide public sector organisations with a high degree of flexibility when it comes to their storage needs, either public cloud based, or in their own private clouds. In our previous blog post we looked at the economic differences between these two approaches. In this blog we will explore some of the security best practices when using cloud storage, so that you can ensure that sensitive data remains securely stored and compliance objectives are met.

Federal agencies are adopting a more modern, digital-centered approach in everything they do. That’s good progress, but it’s also exposing some critical problems in the modernization journey.

In today's digital age, data is the lifeblood of modern organizations — and the US government is no exception. As agencies grapple with the ever-increasing volume and complexity of data, it is imperative to adopt a standardized approach to monitoring, analyzing, and understanding the behavior of complex IT systems. This is where OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework, comes into play.

Like many other industries, organisations in the public sector have been keen to make use of the flexibility offered by cloud computing, but are now observing unpredictable and rising costs. Much of which can be mitigated through careful planning and on-premise infrastructure. Government guidance now recommends switching to a strategy of the most appropriate solution for a problem, rather than a one-size-fits-all or carte blanche approach of shifting all applications to the cloud.

Tool sprawl, further compounded by the inflexibility of legacy tools, poses a major challenge for government IT teams. As agencies work to deliver the digital services their constituents demand, their digital ecosystems have grown to comprise numerous apps, systems and microservices, all specific to the individual IT components of the experience. With disparate tools and systems leading to siloed insights, higher costs, and increased complexity, it’s easy for technical debt to get out of hand.

Innovative cybersecurity measures play a crucial role in safeguarding digital assets and critical infrastructure in an increasingly interconnected world. At SolarWinds, we’re passionate about understanding evolving cyber risks and committed to the public-private partnerships needed to combat threats.

While the Biden administration aggressively pushes federal agencies to modernize their IT infrastructures, ITOps managers are left wondering how to do so without making network management more complex than it already is. Modernization necessitates the addition of more tools, which can easily lead to tool sprawl and increase technical debt. Managers are already using multitudes of vendor-specific tools to monitor different devices and applications. The last thing they want is to add more.