This week's roundup of the latest news and insights gathered from IBM's Government Research Institute thought leaders:

You’ve gathered requirements, evaluated technologies, gotten all the right people to sign off on acquiring new technology, and now comes the hard part — procurement. IDIQs, BPAs, GWACs...the contracting officer is throwing out a bunch of complex terms, options, and estimates of how long it will take to get through negotiations. NetDocuments believes our public sector customers should have contracting options that are a lot like our solutions — easy to use.

In the post-COVID world, the federal government spends about three-fourths of its technology budget maintaining aging computer systems including platforms more than 50 years old and even some that use floppy disks, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

Adhering closely to the U.S. federal government’s top legislative priorities for 2022, state chief information officers (CIO’s) have once again ranked cybersecurity as their top priority for 2022, following an already established decade-long trend in this direction.

Article originally posted by TDS here. 

In the last year, thanks to the pandemic, disruption has been the main driver of change in IT. And enterprise organizations have put increased pressure on their IT leaders more than ever before.

Article originially posted by Kemp here.

Working from home is not for everyone. A lack of space, dodgy internet connections, distractions, can all make for an unproductive experience. Employers are struggling too. Few organizations are fully ready to support a remote workforce. Providing employees with laptops and a VPN connection doesn’t go far enough. Yet, organizations, particularly those in the public sector, have traditionally failed to put plans in place to expand their remote employee management infrastructure.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) adoption is growing in government. Today, a majority of agencies use SaaS applications such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google Cloud G Suite for at least 30% of their mission-critical resources. Yet confusion still reigns around about the data protection in the cloud.

Cloud governance shouldn’t be an afterthought. Indeed, it should be a foundational element of any cloud security strategy. Why? Because the cloud is enormous – it’s software, hardware, developer tools and platforms, and more. All delivered by a host of vendors.

Election security is a big topic, but it resembles a many-legged centipede. Federal contractors face the reality that elections are the purview of state, county and municipal officials. The technical and managerial abilities of these entities vary from what you might expect in a tiny hamlet to what you might encounter in a million-person suburban county.