State and Local

No two governments look exactly alike. Throughout the public sector, budgets and demands vary, which ultimately affects how departments operate on state and local levels.

One common thread among all budgets comes from the fact that IT problems can hinder productivity and financial stability. Strained resources continue to decline as falling sales and income taxes take their toll. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, average state budget shortfalls are already $38 billion, or 7% of total budgets.

Strategic investments in IT are at the heart of the efforts to make Government services more effective, accessible, and transparent. Whether it is managing a data center, cutting costs and building efficiency, or securing your electronic records and system information, DLT Solutions has technology solutions and partners to meet both state and local government technology needs.

Edit \| Delete	Order
Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI): The CNCI program summary promotes partnership between the government, the private sector and academia to achieve a safer digital infrastructure. This initiative aims to create and enhance shared situational awareness of network threats, helping to provide agencies with the ability to act quickly to reduce current vulnerabilities and prevent intrusions. Expanding cyber-education and establishing a front line of defense against immediate threats, strengthens the cybersecurity environment for the future.
Consolidation: While Green IT initiatives are still on the radar when purchasing new equipment, virtualization solutions are often less costly to implement and bring almost immediate results. Consolidating data servers into a single location and boosting the efficiency of the individual servers is really the key to reducing energy consumption. Desktop virtualization and monitoring solutions also produce reductions in energy usage and unnecessary costs to state and local facilities. For cloud deployments, there are four main features to consider: security, data ownership, transferability and disaster recovery. With the ongoing need to reduce costs and improve services, cloud computing provides a more effective IT services solution, especially when coupled with virtualization and management solutions.
Health Care Reform: The recently approved Healthcare Reform will give flexibility to States to adopt more innovative strategies to improve care and the coordination of services for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries. This includes adopting electronic health records (EHRs) and implementing a secure national network to access the records. According to Whitehouse.gov, starting on January 1, 2014, every state will also be required to establish an online marketplace to make it easier for residents and small businesses to compare and purchase affordable health insurance coverage, eventually helping to drive costs down through bundled service purchasing and more quality reporting.
Reducing Costs of Ownership: Even though budgets are decreasing, workers continue to have an increased need to access their information while on the go. Web-based messaging and collaboration tools can save large portions of time and generate cost savings for businesses. More and more employees are accessing web-based tools as a form of communication. Additionally, balancing server workloads and optimizing performance is the key to keeping datacenter costs down.