Digital transformation has never been more urgent for federal agencies. Unfortunately, data’s complexity is holding agencies back from delivering 21st century services to constituents.
According to Gartner, the volume of data that organizations manage will grow 800% over the next five years, with 80% of this information being unstructured. Structured data is information that is organized using pre-defined models such as databases. Unstructured data, meanwhile, is information such as drone footage, maps and video content that isn’t placed in these preexisting formats.
Federal agencies, however, can’t keep up with either kind of data – and both often appear in forms that federal IT systems aren’t capable of handling, such as rich media, imagery, video and other complex formats. It’s a situation that leaves many government employees in the dark about how to best access and govern their existing data agencywide.
Fortunately, cloud computing can help agencies make sense of both their structured and unstructured data. Subsequently, cloud is critical for digital transformation as it’s a process that centers on information collaboration and management. Whether it’s healthcare records at the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) or statistics about military veterans at the Veterans Affairs Department (VA), content management in the cloud can speed up any digital transformation.
GovLoop partnered with Box, a cloud content management solutions provider, on this report about how cloud can improve agencies’ unstructured data access and governance. The following pages share cloud’s potential to improve agencies’ access to mission-critical data so that they serve citizens better. It also details best practices to improve data governance. For additional insights, we interviewed Sonny Hashmi, Managing Director, Global Public Sector at Box.
