With another busy year behind us, it’s time to look ahead to fiscal year (FY) 2022. The official information technology (IT) budget request is $97B, a 4% increase over FY21, which would be a new record. Of course, those numbers undercount all the IT spending that goes unreported. Furthermore, remaining provisions in the American Rescue Plan, the Technology Modernization Fund and IT provisions in the Infrastructure Bill will represent additional pockets of opportunity worth billions for channel partners and technology vendors.

Assuring the best digital employee experience is now a business imperative.

The numbers don't lie. The U.S. public sector is rapidly adopting cloud technologies across the spectrum. According to the NASCIO 2020 State CIO Survey, only 14% of state chief information officer (CIO) organizations do not have a cloud migration strategy, whereas 41% of respondents indicated that they had implemented a cloud first strategy for all new applications.

As I.T. professionals, security needs to be at the forefront of everything that we do. Even in mature organizations with robust cloud deployments we must always believe there is room for improvement. Here are four considerations to make when evaluating the security of your AWS workloads.  

How will you utilize your logging data?

Cloud billing can be a tedious and complicated task if not planned for correctly. If you do not have a well thought out plan on how to approach your AWS bill when charging back to various departments or projects, things can get messy when attempting to divide the bill correctly. In this article we will discuss three methods to make strategizing your approach ahead of time to make things much easier when it comes to invoice time.
 
Cost Allocation Tags

2020 was a transformative year for public sector IT. Accelerated by necessity, agencies rapidly scaled and secured their digital ecosystems to accommodate a newly remote workforce. Against this backdrop, significant cybersecurity hacks revealed continued vulnerabilities in the federal supply chain and state and local IT infrastructures.

Looking forward there is much work to be done. A new administration, new regulations and continued reliance on the cloud will shape public sector IT through 2021.

Teresa Carlson, Vice President, AWS Public Sector held a leadership session, From complexity to clarity: The strategic value of AWS. Teresa’s breakout highlighted how crucial cloud technology has been for organizations. The AWS cloud provides the ability to respond quickly to the new reality brought on by the ongoing global crisis. Several AWS customers shared how they were able to solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges using the cloud. Furthermore, how they are driving impact around big ideas, discoveries, and turning points to solve some of the world’s largest challenges.

This will be the first in what DLT intends to be an ongoing series of posts highlighting what our partners are building for the Public Sector using AWS. 

The Challenge
A Global Service provider wanted a way to develop a messaging solution, to augment, marketing and sales teams for promoting events using a standard Calendar Invite.

Before reading this month's Thought Light interview, we invite you to read about BMC's multi/hybrid cloud initiatives for federal government, click here. 

What is BMC and how does it help the public sector?

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.