Nearly every agency is working with a constant lack of IT resources—staff and budget alike. At the same time, many of these agencies have been performing IT tasks manually for years, heightening the pain of that already painful burden. Agencies, take heart. There is a way to ease that pain. In fact, there is a single solution that solves both of these issues: automation.

For the past few years, the word “open” has been a cornerstone of government IT. Not open in terms of security, of course—that would never do—but open in relation to technology that allows for greater agility and flexibility, as outlined in the Federal Source Code Policy.

A security information and event management (SIEM) system is an essential part of any security strategy and can help you pass a compliance audit (think ISO 27001, which requires event data to be aggregated from multiple systems). But SIEMs can be expensive, time-consuming, and hard work, especially for smaller, resource-constrained government IT departments, which often puts this essential tool out of their reach.

According to federal CIO Tony Scott, the U.S. government spends 76% of its $88 billion IT budget on operating and maintaining out-of-date technologies – that’s three times what is spent on modern systems. And while the proposed Modernizing Government Technology Act seeks to change all that with a centralized fund that agencies can apply for, in the meantime, aside from money, why are federal agencies so resistant to switching out old IT?

Halloween may be behind us, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some scary things creeping up on federal IT professionals and security managers as the year winds down.

Chief among these haunts is the dreaded specter of network downtime. It lurks in the background, ready to pounce at the most unexpected and inopportune moments. It brings with it the nightmare of slow application performance, lost productivity, and average hourly costs that can swell into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Enterprise architectures have certainly evolved from flat file networks to today’s highly complex network, filled with billions of connect devices and applications—a phenomena we know as the Internet of Things (IOT). What hasn’t changed, however, is the ever-increasing need for bandwidth. In fact, as complexity increases so does the demand for more bandwidth, making this a core priority for most federal IT pros.

Jetlag is a mind killer.

Anyone who has ever had to regularly brave the US Airport Circus to make sure the checks don’t bounce at the end of the month, understands that jetlag isn’t something that only hits you the day after you travel. The confused, fuzzy-headed filter will occasionally slam down on your poor hapless brain anywhere from 24 to 168 hours after landing back in your home time zone.

We are going to take a simple but often misunderstood AWS methodology / feature and drag it out into the unapologetic sunlight via my way of looking at things. I tend to deal with IT professionals from all spectrums of the scale, so in the finest tradition of compromise, we are going to soar between 30,000 and 500 feet on this one.

If you’re like many federal IT professionals, your understanding of application performance management (APM) has probably been rigidly shaped by the limited definitions put forth by analysts and other industry experts. Those groups tend to place APM in a very narrow, easily consumable box. To them, it’s software that incorporates analytics, end-user experience monitoring, and a few other components.

Forget all of that.

Federal fiscal year-end is the busiest season for government IT spending. With only a few weeks left to spend the $3.8 trillion apportioned in Uncle Sam’s 2016 budget, the pressure is on to spend prudently and procure efficiently.

But with growing media and public concern that year-end spending is wasteful, how can your agency make smart IT investments of tax payer dollars come September 30?