Increasing budget pressures and rising costs to operate and maintain government systems have forced agencies to take a hard look at their IT operations. Under the current administration, agencies are required to identify specific high-risk legacy IT systems and set a budget for system modernization.
From a technology standpoint, two key drivers powering IT modernization have been open source software and cloud computing. Government IT professionals are finding that commercially supported open source solutions can help deliver new services quickly and cost-effectively, while also providing a strategic path for transitioning workloads to an on-premise or external cloud. Additionally, a 2016 federal mandate requires agencies to use open source code in at least 20 percent of their development efforts for three years, which further underscores the importance and influence of open source.
Among the top modernization challenges that agencies face are managing manual processes that are not scalable, determining the best way to modernize applications, and dealing with the cultural hurdles around development, operations and security.
To help agencies navigate their path to IT modernization with hybrid cloud, GovLoop partnered with Red Hat for this report. In it, we explore common challenges to IT modernization, open source and hybrid cloud solutions, and best practices for taking advantage of these solutions to solve government’s pressing modernization needs.
