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The Federal Marketing Insight a weekly feature highlighting a topical federal marketing subject. It's meant to be an insightful and a quick read.
As agencies move applications and services to the cloud over, two common themes emerged. First is the initial step toward the cloud usually begins with virtualization across multiple platforms: applications, server, desktop and user. Cloud then opened the door to enabling mission operations in a mobile environment. Federal employees could take advantage of smartphones and tablet computers to input or review data in real-time, and improve access to applications no matter where they are working. The Postal Service's Inspector General's office, for example, virtualized more than 400 servers serving both its front end infrastructure and back-end storage and computing power. By virtualizing, the USPS OIG now is moving toward a bring-your-own-device or BYOD strategy to let employees take advantage of the virtualized environment securely and efficiently. Other agencies are following suit. The Navy hopes to virtualize all their servers and applications by 2017 as both a cost cutting strategy and to improve access through mobile devices. There's no doubt federal CIOs have accepted the benefits of virtualization. A recent survey by Forrester and NetApp of private sector IT executives found they say virtualization drives down hardware costs and improve disaster recovery capabilities. Now add the quick evolution of mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets, and the benefits of virtualization multiply. At the same time, virtualization and mobile computing creates challenges—chief among them is security of data and the device.