CIO Chuck Riddle Speaks About The Next Generation Desktop Environment

With the fiscal reality of today’s government, it is common to hear that agencies are increasingly being asked to do more with fewer resources.

Technological innovation has increasingly been seen as one more way government can cut costs, while increasing productivity. From the White House’s Digital Government Strategy to individual agencies, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Program (EEOP), beginning Bring Your Own Device pilots, government is trying to keep up with the pace of innovation.

With the promise of cost savings and increased mobility for workers, many agencies are starting to look into the benefits of the Cloud. On September 12, 2012, Chris Dorobek of the DorobekINSIDER moderated a panel at Federal Computer Week’s A Cloud on Every Desk: Moving Towards a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. Chuck Riddle, Chief Information Officer at the Government Printing Office (GPO), presented the Keynote address at the event.

During the Keynote, Riddle spoke about GPO’s progress toward a virtual desktop infrastructure. The GPO is currently working on both consolidating their data centers, as well as virtualizing their server infrastructure. Riddle emphasized that cloud technologies are going to have a great impact on the federal government: “I believe that we really have to do this just to keep up with the pace of technology and to adapt to it – done right, I really believe that it will allow us to stretch our limited IT resources that much further, and help us achieve the mission of GPO.”

While speaking about the pros of Cloud technologies, Riddle mentioned several areas he sees as the greatest benefits. He emphasized the increased mobility of the workforce, as workers have access to enterprise information anywhere, at any time. Additionally, persistent and non-persistent differentiated access allows for greater security of information. Combined with the increasing acceptance of Bring Your Own Device policies, virtual desktop infrastructure could allow for dramatic cost savings.

Moving forward, Riddle notes that the world is rapidly moving toward web-based applications. For most agencies, however, this will not happen overnight. Government is definitely moving toward virtual desktop infrastructure, and as it does both the public and public sector employees will share in the benefits.