Passed in 2021, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, or Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is a massive investment in America’s infrastructure that’s creating a wave of opportunities for AEC firms. With billions of dollars allocated for infrastructure projects, many firms have secured funding and are preparing for significant growth.

Recently the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released a roadmap entitled Vision for the IC Information Environment to outline a vision to protect the nation from adversaries and maintain a “strategic advantage" over those intending to harm its information infrastructure. The roadmap contains recommendations from a collaboration of more than one hundred technical leaders from the intelligence community (IC).

Welcome to 2023 — an era of modernization where public sector information technology (IT) market growth is dominated by technologies that can create operational efficiencies and enhance the delivery of citizen-facing services. IT leaders are approaching municipality and jurisdictional operations from the lens of optimization, and there is only room for "smart" solutions.

DLT Solutions recently sat down with NetApp Senior Director of U.S. Public Sector Channel Sales, David Drahozal, to discuss the recent revolution of NetApp's data fabric solutions.

DLT: So David, tell us a little about what you do at NetApp.

David: For over a decade, I’ve had the privilege of leading the US Public Sector channel here at NetApp.  Its been a real exciting time as we have evolved from a NAS company to a leader in the consolidated virtualized data center, to today being a leader in hybrid cloud capabilities.

A vast majority of government networks are driven by Microsoft products, from Office 365 to the Azure cloud platform. It should come as no surprise, then, that more and more agencies are looking for tools to monitor Microsoft systems more effectively—all through a single pane of glass.

The good news is there are ways to make the most of existing Microsoft technology with complementary monitoring strategies that will meet the needs of the federal IT operations security teams, SysAdmins, DevOps pros, and managers.

While there has been a steady increase in the adoption of DevOps in the federal government – 75% of CIOs report that their organizations are now adopting it – many public sector organizations struggle to adapt to the DevOps culture.

Challenges to Using DevOps in the Public Sector

If you’re worried about your next database migration or upgrade, you’re not alone. A survey revealed that 90% of DBAs are worried too. It’s not surprising, these projects are a serious source of stress and must be performed speedily and with minimal downtime.

There are several reasons why migration projects fail. Typical pitfalls include:

Federal IT pros understand the challenge agencies face in trying to manage an ever-growing, increasingly complex network environment. While federal IT networks are becoming more distributed—with more devices being added all the time—the demand for security and availability is increasing as well. Yes, at some point new technologies may make networking easier and more secure; until that point, however, growing pains seem to be getting worse.

Government networks are some of the largest in the world. Ensuring these mission-critical infrastructures are optimized for automation and performance—particularly in today’s increasingly complex hybrid IT environments—is quite a tall order.

How do federal IT pros ensure the high availability required? How do they connect faults to performance, and make direct connections between networks, systems, and applications within large, hybrid environments?

Microsoft Active Directory is a critical tool that helps system administrators manage user privileges and secure their IT infrastructure, yet Active Directory presents several security challenges. Most problematic is that Active Directory’s attack surface is huge. Targets for attack include every domain name user account, admin and security group, domain controller, backup, admin workstation, and admin delegations and privileges. If any one of these targets is compromised, your entire Active Directory can be compromised too.

The Threats