Federal Pain Points and IT Requirements

The latest Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) Scorecard, released in December 2021, highlights how federal agencies are faring across several areas related to IT modernization. The full breakdown from the scorecard is available here. These scorecards are useful to identify where government agencies are struggling and where they are doing well. Consequently, technology vendors and channel partners can use them as a guide for identifying what solutions their customers need.

By Mav Turner, VP, Product Management, SolarWinds

For federal IT pros, moving to a cloud environment is a “when” rather than an “if” proposition. From the government’s recently released Report on IT Modernization, calling for agencies to identify solutions to current barriers regarding agency cloud adoption, to the White House’s draft release of a new “Cloud Smart” policy, which updates the “Cloud First” policy introduced in 2010; cloud migration continues to be a priority.

Federal IT pros are facing “Herculean tasks” when it comes to security challenges, a new survey conducted by DLT partner, SolarWinds, reveals.

Federal fiscal year-end (FFYE) is the busiest season for government IT spending and with ongoing squabbles about budgets and fiscal accountability, the pressure is on to spend prudently and procure efficiently.

As costs have declined, all-flash storage has become the de facto enterprise standard for primary storage and the foundation for any cloud – internal, SaaS, or public. For the public sector, flash can address agency modernization efforts (mobile, data analytics and cloud) and help cut costs and reduce power and space requirements, despite growing data sets.

Consider the benefits:

According to federal CIO Tony Scott, the U.S. government spends 76% of its $88 billion IT budget on operating and maintaining out-of-date technologies – that’s three times what is spent on modern systems. And while the proposed Modernizing Government Technology Act seeks to change all that with a centralized fund that agencies can apply for, in the meantime, aside from money, why are federal agencies so resistant to switching out old IT?

When news broke last month that the Pentagon is still using 1970s-era floppy disks to run its nuclear program, most of us expressed incredulity. Unless you happen to work for the federal government that is.

According to federal CIO Tony Scott, the U.S. government spends 76% of its $88 billion IT budget on operating and maintaining out-of-date technologies – that’s three times what is spent on modern systems.