The Challenges to State and Local Government

This blog post is an excerpt from our recent GovLoop Academy course, created in partnership with VMWare and AWS, How Cloud Can Modernize State and Local Government. To access the full course, head here.

There are plenty of challenges facing government today. Citizen demands are rising as digital, intuitive and self-service options become the expectation for both private and public sector services. And public servants also want the option to do their work from more locations – including in the field and at home – using advanced, mobile technologies.

Government IT departments are largely in charge of acquiring, deploying and managing the many systems that support these new applications and services. But they have challenges of their own including managing increasingly complex IT environments, confronting a growing volume of service requests, and learning new skills and procedures to keep pace with the latest technologies.

For state and local governments, these challenges are only compounded. In many cases, these organizations have fewer staff and smaller budgets to apply toward technical innovation. Plus, many individual state and local agencies have deployed their own data centers and other IT resources over time, in siloes. That makes it difficult for enterprise IT departments to integrate and consolidate new technologies for governmentwide operational efficiencies and cost-savings.

To confront these challenges, many state and local government organizations are pursuing cloud computing. In fact, in a 2018 NASCIO study, only 17 percent of state CIOs said they had no current or developing plans for cloud migration.

That’s no surprise, given the promise of cloud.

Cloud offers a wide array of potential benefits including flexibility to handle new workloads and scalability to extend capabilities across new or disparate environments. Cloud also promises significant cost-savings through decreasing on-premise and hardware investments, as well as on-demand, as-needed resource provisioning. Finally, cloud offers the potential for agencies to quickly implement new technologies with reliable computing performance.

But to fully reap the rewards of cloud, agencies must consider which cloud offering best fits their existing infrastructure investments, IT skill sets and management procedures. We’ll explain more in the full course.