Ideally, any government service should be available to a qualifying constituent at the resident’s convenience. However, that requires investments in cloud resources available any time of day from any location. Want to pay a fine or fee before the workday begins? Go online and pay that bill. Want to search crime data in a neighborhood while trying to sleep at night? Pull up a phone and query the reports.
These tasks become possible by empowering modern infrastructure, which supports mobile apps that can be used on the go. It also serves as the basis for e-commerce solutions that allow citizens to pay those fines or fees. Moreover, modernizing allows for artificial intelligence and machine learning in your environment, which simplify data analysis. For example, crime reports can spring to life around a location at the touch of a button with geospatial data processing.
As agencies experienced during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, it is critical to serve as many constituents as possible without them being tied to their physical locations. Cloud infrastructure improves the “flexibility, scalability, manageability and security” for modernization, as CDW says in a recent white paper, “Meeting Demands for a Modernized IT Infrastructure.” The goal is to reach as many citizens as possible without time and space restrictions.
The Advantages of an IT Refresh for State and Local Agencies
In Canada, the government of Grey County, Ontario, upgraded its systems to ensure continuity of operations for its services — ranging from welfare services to road maintenance and emergency management.
Although the county once maintained backups for these critical systems with a single on-premises server, it realized that solution could easily fail and modernized with a hybrid cloud solution utilizing Zerto continuous data protection and Microsoft Azure. Should systems fail today due to a ransomware attack, for example, agencies can bring them back online promptly, ensuring uninterrupted citizen services.
Agencies have the opportunity to prioritize IT modernization as the world enters a new phase of controlling and living with COVID-19. Those governments that will best provide citizen services moving forward can capitalize on the power of technologies like hybrid cloud and hyperconverged infrastructure.
