Leveraging Federal Aid to Build AI-Ready Government

State and local governments have had a fantastic opportunity to advance IT and modernize their technology thanks to the recent influx of federal aid.

FREMONT, CA: The current influx of federal aid has presented state and local governments with a fantastic opportunity to enhance IT and drive technology modernization. Numerous agencies have used federal money to enable remote and hybrid work within their companies, migrate mission-critical systems and workloads to the cloud to improve system performance, dependability, and resilience and bolster security in the face of repeated cyberattacks.

Nevertheless, a recent nationwide poll of state and local government executives conducted by the Center for Digital Government (CDG) reveals that certain states and localities continue to struggle to maximize available federal money for digital advances.

As governments adapt to a new way of conducting business in the wake of the epidemic, they will need to determine how to preserve the technology they've adopted and continually improve their infrastructure as business requirements change. As new federal funding streams are deployed, such as the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), state and local governments will need to build a framework for applying and maximizing federal money. This will enable them to adopt emerging technologies that significantly enhance operational efficiency, mobility, equity, sustainability, and the physical and digital infrastructure's resilience.

Pillars For Optimizing Funding Opportunities

Taking advantage of funding opportunities requires state and local governments to determine what goals they want to achieve, what projects they need to launch to accomplish those goals, and what resources they need to fund those projects, including federal funding.

Secure: In the future, state and local governments will need to prioritize IT and operational technology (OT) security. Adopting a framework of zero trust and investing in cybersecurity solutions helps reduce the danger of cyber assaults. Zero trust is becoming the norm for enhancing an organization's cybersecurity posture, focusing on least privileged access and continuous trust verification. It lets businesses build their architecture so that any device and user requesting access to their network, systems, and applications is assumed to be a possible threat.

Zero trust necessitates multiple enabling technologies, including endpoint threat detection tools and security, orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions. State and local governments should explore using federal money aligned with this zero-trust approach to secure their whole digital estate, including identities, devices, apps, infrastructure, networks, and data, as well as OT systems and devices.

Retrieve: States and municipalities must also invest heavily in improving IT and OT disaster recovery and business continuity.

Many government companies lack strong backup and recovery policies for mission-critical IT and OT systems in their on-premises data centers. In the event of a cyber attack, data center equipment failure, connectivity challenges, or natural disaster, retrieving these systems could negatively affect their operations and public services. Utilizing the cloud for dependable backup and recovery solves this issue and substantially enhances the resilience of these systems.

Maintain: Funding from the IIJA will result in a generation's most significant investment in infrastructure upgrading. Considering the volume and complexity of maintenance and modernization work state and local agencies are attempting to do, digital asset and field service management technologies are essential for restoring and maintaining these assets throughout time. AI-powered asset condition evaluations, remote inspections using digital twins, real-time asset condition monitoring, and predictive maintenance are applicable use cases.