If you have been looking for the right time to sell your technology product or service to the state, local and education (SLED) market, now is the time to act. With thirty-six states beginning their fiscal year on July 1st, now is the time to position yourself to take advantage of a confluence of once-in-a-lifetime conditions that have left the SLED market booming with opportunity. Here are some of the factors driving that opportunity:

New Leadership

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurned greater demand for health information technology (IT) by demonstrating the importance of having robust medical research, health surveillance and healthcare systems capable of rapidly responding to new and developing situations, something which requires strong IT investment in big data, cybersecurity and cloud. In addition, both the pandemic and emerging technologies have led to numerous changes within the healthcare industry, such as telehealth expansion and increased use of wearables, which necessitate robust health IT solutions.

Before reading this month's Thought Light interview, we invite you to read about BMC's multi/hybrid cloud initiatives for federal government, click here. 

What is BMC and how does it help the public sector?

Cloud governance shouldn’t be an afterthought. Indeed, it should be a foundational element of any cloud security strategy. Why? Because the cloud is enormous – it’s software, hardware, developer tools and platforms, and more. All delivered by a host of vendors.

It has been 10 years since the U.S. government began warming to cloud computing, beginning with the federal Cloud First initiative in 2010 leading to today’s Cloud Smart strategy – a game plan for bringing processes and applications into a new hardware environment.

But to take advantage full advantage of a cloud-driven ecosystem, the government must have more than just a cloud strategy. Agencies also need a data strategy.

What is a cloud data strategy?

It’s often said that there are two types of organizations: those that have been hacked, and those that will be – turning the conversations around security breaches from ‘what if?’ to ‘when?’.

The service-to-the-citizen movement is adding oomph to federal agencies’ adoption of cloud computing. And vice versa.

Choice and self-determination are cornerstones of our nation’s democratic process. Come election night, we might not all root for the same candidates, but there’s one point we can all rally around – the need for modernization and the role of the cloud in powering U.S. elections.

The Obama and Trump administrations may not have a lot in common. But encouraging federal agencies to move their computing workloads to cloud services providers has been a definite point of policy continuity.

Recall that during the Obama years, cloud and a fresh data center consolidation initiative roughly coincided. (I say “fresh” because of presidential findings that the government has too many computers dated at least to the Reagan administration).

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming. Contrary to the stuff of science fiction, however, AI has the potential to have a positive impact within the federal IT community. The adoption of AI will likely be the result of the adoption of hybrid and cloud IT computing.