Thriving in the next normal: what government CIOs need to know

As federal agencies develop and implement their back-to-office plans, the government is also preparing its plans for providing federal workers with workplace flexibility. In November, the Office of Personnel Management issued new guidance encouraging agencies to allow telework or remote work in their workforce policies.

The official stamp of approval on flexible telework policies in the federal workforce offers advantages and creates new opportunities, but it will also create challenges for federal chief information officers and other IT leaders responsible for ensuring mission success and security wherever federal employees are working.

With available budget allocated through the Technology Modernization Fund, many government CIOs may look to expand their remote capabilities. This includes accelerating use of cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that have proved crucial to maintaining productivity and minimizing disruption during the pandemic. Equally important, agency leaders should keep in mind the importance of maintaining end-to-end network visibility with every technology added.

Government CIOs should not rely on maintaining the short-term workarounds that have been used to support or expand many IT applications under the pandemic’s emergency circumstances. The shift to a widespread, remote work environment has created a more distributed network and, in turn, an inherently more complex one. The most proactive IT leaders are now reexamining their networks and environments to determine what long-term changes are needed to ensure resilience, security and reliability in light of the new workforce policies and to be prepared for other disruptive events. This is where visibility plays a vital role.

Unleashing visibility’s dynamic force

In an ideal state, visibility provides full transparency and a comprehensive understanding of everything and everyone on the network at any point in time. The visibility should be deep and broad, delivering clear, high-level views as well as detailed, granular views of data flows at the packet level. With this level of visibility, agency IT teams can quickly monitor, detect and mitigate system failures and disruptions as well as anomalous behaviors or malicious activity.

Federal IT teams must be prepared to defend against a growing number and sophistication of cyber threats. From ransomware attacks that target critical infrastructure like the Colonial Pipeline, forcing the government to react, to sophisticated “trusted vendor” attacks like SUNBURST where departments are direct targets, all agencies must be hyper-aware of their users, access, devices and additional networks, assets and layers that are connected to internal networks. This means effective visibility is end-to-end. With a full, 360-degree view, agency IT teams can monitor networks, users, accounts, operations and applications to ensure they are working properly and within their clearance.

In addition to monitoring, when done right, visibility becomes something much more powerful: cybersecurity intelligence that informs comprehensive detection, investigation and mitigation of advanced threats.

End-to-end visibility can be considered as the essential foundation of cybersecurity. Full situational awareness and monitoring of all network access, operations, functions and devices is the only way to proactively identify potential threats in as close to real time as possible.

Leveling up optimization and productivity

While most people think of network visibility when it comes to security, many overlook the value of visibility in regard to reliability and consistency. Visibility as a monitoring tool cannot only help hunt for suspicious or malicious behavior; it can flag systems, accounts, applications and more that are slowing down the network or not working optimally.

All too often, end users encounter network and application performance issues first. With network visibility, IT teams can use performance analytics to preemptively resolve problems, instead of scrambling to resolve issues after they’ve impacted performance. Finding and resolving problems usually includes downtime — time where a program or network is not working or offline. For the federal government, that downtime can be the difference between lives lost or millions of dollars spent. Automated network monitoring can dramatically slash the time it takes to find and fix problems.

Beyond visibility, active performance monitoring — ideally through automated processes — underpins that full visualization. Performance monitoring can help optimize network functionality, troubleshoot issues in real time, and consistently report on network health and availability from the end-user perspective. Automating these processes significantly accelerates response and resolution time in resolving issues impacting productivity and detecting threats.

With new guidance from OPM and the TMF, government CIOs have an opportunity to not only adapt with agility to evolving workplaces, but to thrive in doing so. The key: visibility that empowers leaders, personnel and users alike.

Marlin McFate is chief technology officer for the U.S. Public Sector at Riverbed|Aternity.

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