State and local governments are tasked with providing for the needs of citizens by maintaining critical infrastructure and assets, all while providing constituent services of all types. These demands range from public safety, utilities, and services to a panoply of other needs. These public-sector entities are relying more and more on government IT solutions in order to reduce costs while increasing flexibility and scalability. This shift is happening due to the inherent needs of these entities to do much more with very limited IT personnel and budgetary resources.

As the mission of government grows and evolves, so must its approach to delivering support. That means finding IT solutions that can meet all of those needs. While the following four solutions can help make government IT processes more efficient, they ostensibly fall under the cloud-services banner. That being said, this post breaks them down to show how their proper application can improve efficiencies in profound ways.

Cloud Services

Initiating cloud services allows state and municipal governments to run a wide range of services and applications while decreasing capital expenditure and operating expenditure. This can include:

• Access to network, hardware, data center resources, and sometimes operating systems through a vendor
• Land-management and records-management systems
• Geographic information systems for municipal data related to zoning, property boundaries, political boundaries, utilities, infrastructure, and public safety
• Application hosting and delivery
• Sharing services among entities
• Identity and access management
• Application development for simplifying public-service process access and completion

This is only a fraction of the ways in which government IT is changing the way that public-sector entities are operating and connecting with communities for reduced costs, greater agility, and infinite scalability with ever-tightening budgets. The following solutions are offshoots of the general cloud solution, but they show how public-sector entities can embrace cloud solutions in various ways via a gradual method or an all-in approach.

Data Center Colocation

When it comes to maintaining data centers, a local government’s objectives are to minimize risk, capture cost savings, reduce IT complexity, and ensure the security of public information. In many situations, a data center colocation strategy provides everything an organization needs in order to meet these objectives.

Server Virtualization for Backup and Disaster Recovery

For most state and local Government entities, tight budgets and small IT staffs are a fact of life. The need to modernize data centers through virtualization storage, combined with modern storage applications and cloud-based services, is the best answer to scalability, uptime, access, and security.

These entities need very short recovery time objectives and sufficient recovery point objectives in the face of a natural or man-made disaster in order to ensure that data, applications, and services are uninterrupted. State and local governments are turning to virtualized server environments for creation of robust backup, business continuity, and disaster recovery solutions that are efficient and cost-effective.

Mobility

Today’s state and municipal governments need to have a mobile workforce in order to more effectively work, deliver services, and engage the communities that they serve. By helping these entities make the IT infrastructure updates necessary in order to support a mobile workforce and implementing a robust enterprise mobility management capabilities, giving state and local agencies what they need. That can include:

• Robust mobile device management
• Mobile application stores
• Cloud infrastructure to support mobility
• Security (identity/access management, CAC/PIV readers, app-level security) and mobile thin client

In order to implement these types of government IT solutions that bring greater process efficiency, public-sector entities are increasingly relying on the support of highly experienced and comprehensive networking technologies from managed IT services providers. Their ability to provide consulting and planning, architecting, and data migration as part of a cloud-services approach enables public-sector entities to have the support and specialization that they need affordably and on demand.

This can work in complete tandem with the chosen cloud provider that handles all of the back-end maintenance and running of the cloud-based services. This effectively enables government entities with small budgets and IT staffs to save money, time, and labor. Simultaneously, the government entities get the technical support and expertise, flexibility, agility, security, and access that they need in order to make information and services available internally and to large population centers.