Blog originally posted by Federal News Network here.

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?

Getting to know the “enemy with no face” is critical to winning the cyber war. In fact, it’s the tagline from the U.S. Army’s latest cyber warrior recruitment ad. Yet, one of the biggest challenges to doing so is that most organizations have zero visibility into a significant percentage of the endpoints on their network. That’s because they are either not managed (BYOD, guest, and IoT), have disabled or broken agents, or aren’t detected by periodic scans.

Digital transformation, application modernization, faster service delivery – these terms are being thrown around so much that they’ve become so ubiquitous as to be meaningless.

What is digital transformation after all? For me, the best analogy is Blockbuster versus Netflix. Failing to anticipate the shift to on-demand and streaming entertainment, Blockbuster failed to futureproof its business model. It resisted digital transformation, and paid the price.

On the heels of their big announcement, McAfee hosted the recent “Security Through Innovation” conference sponsored by DLT, where government and industry executives touted key ideas, changes of mindset that we need to start to win the cybersecurity war.  Covering everything from Cloud to private/public partnerships, to CDM and infrastructure, here are the top 3 key takeaways from DLT's Chief Cyber Technologist Don Maclean.

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.

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.

2016 is/was the year Gartner predicted that DevOps would go mainstream. But a big challenge for government IT operations is how teams can modernize software development while still operating their traditional apps and infrastructure. After all, according to federal CIO Tony Scott, the U.S. government spends 76% of its $88 billion IT budget on operating and maintaining legacy technologies – that’s three times what is spent on modern systems.