U.S. public sector organizations are moving further into the cloud. That’s according to a new study from DLT partner, SolarWinds. In fact, 96% of public IT practitioners, managers, and directors report that they have migrated critical applications and infrastructure over the past year.

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.

Can you afford for your team to lose eight hours a day? According to the 2016 State of Data Center Architecture and Monitoring and Management report by ActualTech Media in partnership with my company, SolarWinds, that’s precisely what is happening to today’s IT administrators when they try to identify the root cause of a virtualization performance problem. And that doesn’t even take into account the time required to remediate it.

In some ways, data has become just as much a colleague to federal IT managers as the person sitting next to them. Sure, data can’t pick up a burrito for you at lunchtime, but it’s still extraordinarily important to agency operations. Data keeps things going so that everyone in the agency can do their jobs – just like your fellow IT professionals.

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.

When it comes to cybersecurity, once again The White House means business.

Where can you learn about the latest tech trends in government, network with thousands of federal, state and local govies and earn up to 5 continuing professional education (CPE) credits?!?

Answer: Your desk!

DLT is proud to sponsor the fourth annual GovLoop Government Innovators Virtual Summit taking place on April 22^nd from 10 AM – 5 PM ET.