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?

There is a dramatic shift underway in the federal technology landscape on a scale rarely seen more than once every decade or so. Computing environments are evolving from traditional on-premises-only to a hybrid strategy that migrates some infrastructure to the cloud, while keeping some critical systems onsite.

According to SolarWinds’ IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution, which includes a survey of government IT professionals, hybrid IT will continue to be the norm for the foreseeable future.

With continued unpredictability about the annual federal appropriations process, the 2016 federal fiscal year-end busy season is likely to be as crazy as usual for federal procurement teams.

When news broke last month that the Pentagon is still using 1970s-era floppy disks to run its nuclear program, most of us expressed incredulity. Unless you happen to work for the federal government that is.

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to federal CIO Tony Scott, the U.S. government spends 76% of its $88 billion IT budget on operating and maintaining out-of-date technologies – that’s three times what is spent on modern systems.

Disasters such as weather, earthquakes, fire, cyber-attacks, terrorism and even human error, have all impacted government systems at one point or another and will continue to do so.

The Rolling Stones once wrote a song about how time waits for no one, but the inverse is also true today. These days, no one waits for time; certainly not government personnel who depend on speedy networks to deliver mission-critical applications and data.

If you were asked to name some of the biggest proponents and propagators of technology in the modern age, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Elon Musk might spring to mind.  But what about the U.S. government?

Yes, that right. Technology hasn’t just shaped how Uncle Sam does business (think citizen self-service tools, cybersecurity awareness, and more) the U.S government has also spurred innovation.

My wife and I recently hiked the Stony Man Trail in the Shenandoah National Park. It was so much fun that we hiked it again a few weeks later with our college-aged kids and close friends. The four-mile hike leads to a spectacular summit, but also provides beautiful views of different vistas along the way. Our group hiked at different paces, so my wife and I suggested short goals for everyone to pause at trail crossings so we did not have large gaps in our convoy. We took pictures along the way and at the summit, then proceeded back down the mountain to our cars...

Like it or not, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is coming and although implementations may offer many of the benefits hyped by vendors last year, there are also a few unforeseen security and operational challenges. These SDN challenges aren’t unique – for the most part they’re the same faced by IT in general – only in the Department of Defense’s (DOD) case, they are on a larger sale than any enterprise on Earth.