Government IT Leaders Look for Mavericks to Drive Innovation and Change

The pace of technological change and innovation amidst the unrelenting demand for new capabilities, efficiency and security is causing government and education IT leaders to re-think their digital transformation strategies.  

At the Nutanix® Cloud Together Summit, industry experts and IT leaders from federal, state and local governments discussed top challenges and shared valuable insights on navigating and succeeding in their modernization journey. The group agreed  that speed, agility, resilience, performance, and aligning on zero-trust architecture are key IT imperatives. 

Three key takeaways:

1. Gain new collaboration partners.

Government IT leaders are seeking new collaboration partners - often in unexpected places - to solve problems and realize new capabilities.  The same insight was shared at AFCEA West, where IT leaders from the Department of Navy discussed learning from the US Air Force to accelerate their progress in advancing a specific modernization initiative. 

Government IT leaders are looking internally for – and actively supporting – “mavericks” who understand their unique environment and can help push the edge to revise technology choices and processes to foster innovation and improvement.

2. Adopt a “course correctible” IT strategy.

The old linear model of defining requirements, building, testing, and deploying solutions takes too long and assumes an ideal end-state. Most government IT organizations are standing up software factories to translate ideas into applications that enable improvements and new capabilities to support mission success. 

Since the “ideal end-state” may not be known in today's complex and fluid environment, agencies need a more agile  model for developing and deploying modern solutions. A new model consisting of building, testing, writing requirements as they go, and adjusting before scaling out to deploy a broader solution is needed. Agility is key, and agencies are realizing they need options such as  moving workloads between clouds, bringing workloads back on-premises, or reorganizing IT assets across on-premises, cloud service providers (CSPs), or different hyperscale cloud environments like AWS and Azure for developer-ready infrastructure.

3. Standardize on platforms that consolidate sprawl.

Migrating to the cloud is a multi-dimensional problem with multiple decision points that may create feedback loops, each requiring various analysis tasks. Government IT can end up with a complex hybrid environment consisting of  public cloud services, private cloud infrastructure and, increasingly, remote or edge computing infrastructure. As a result, government agencies are searching for a new way to manage resource diversity while fulfilling mission demands and ensuring real-time processing, secure data storage, and governance. 

Experts agreed that interoperability and a unified management and control plane are necessary to effectively and securely manage infrastructure, apps and data. 

How Can Nutanix help in this volatile and complex IT environment?

Government and education institutions choose Nutanix as their ideal platform to support applications and workloads so they can thrive in this new world of complexity. Our single software-defined platform runs on-premises, edge, public cloud, and between CSPs. Organizations find that workloads run better on Nutanix because memory, CPU and storage capacity scale linearly in just a few clicks from a unified management dashboard. Nutanix delivers fast time to value, deploying on-premises in less than a day and extending to the AWS® and Azure® clouds in hours. 

Our customers can easily move applications and workloads to the public cloud, across to a new public cloud, or back on-premises, gaining the agility they require.  Unified management centrally controls infrastructure, databases, workload security, self-service, planning, chargeback and governance across your entire IT estate. Licenses can be moved across your IT environment, reducing license costs and purchasing complexity.

Our security-centric software comes pre-configured with Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIGs) and aligns with NIST 800-53, DISA DOD, and CISA CDM standards. This simplifies the secure hardening of critical systems and infrastructure, and automates compliance in the event of a configuration shift to self-heal anomalies. 

Our web-scale architecture empowers government agencies to modernize their IT estate and leverage  new tools and technologies, including critical cybersecurity technologies. Our platform delivers a developer-ready infrastructure that seamlessly adapts to evolving requirements.

Learn more at www.nutanix.com/solutions/federal and try our software for free with a test drive. 

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