Of the many, many challenges the COVID-19 pandemic surfaced for the federal space, not the least among them is the dilemma of maintaining a secure, but disparate workforce. This hurdle pushed federal IT leaders to explore and implement many cloud-based IT infrastructures, but still presented big questions around security, particularly when considering the differences between work and home networks. Logically, these needs gave rise to the adoption of the “Anything-as-a-Service,” or XaaS mindset, with federal agencies picking and choosing the right IT infrastructure applications that meet their security needs.

To unpack some of the challenges, solutions, and overall sentiments around XaaS, Government Technology Insider sat down with SHI International’s Global Sales Vice President of Defense and Aerospace Richard Place and Field Solutions Engineer Jeff Franckhauser. Here’s what they had to say about the shifting landscape and how providers like SHI are stepping up to meet the changing needs of federal IT decision makers:

Download ESG Report: Flexible IT Models Drive Efficiency & Innovation

Government Technology Insider (GTI) Editors: How have the expectations around federal IT infrastructure changed as a result of the pandemic and an increasingly remote workforce?

Richard Place: Since the pandemic, data management has changed significantly due to the increase in a large, remote, and unsecured workforce. This change has required many IT managers in the federal space to rethink network, access, data storage and, more importantly, security policy. With more employees and staff working from home, it’s created many issues regarding staff accessing secured information and remote files and transferring data from desktop to server. This is because all endpoints, including mobile devices, laptops and tablets, need to be secured as well as the on-prem, off-prem, and cloud data.

The security issues brought on by the pandemic show a marketable increase for state-sponsored hacking as well as ransomware attacks. The federal government is still reeling from the supply hack that exposed many federal agencies’ data at its core. This prompted the federal government to mandate the Zero Trust Framework to establish better protocols for securing data at all levels and has been put through President Biden and the Federal Data Strategy to provide additional funding.

GTI Editors: What challenges have you seen in the federal space when it comes to flexible IT adoption?

Jeff Franckhauser: Many federal agencies have exceptionally large databases and vast amounts of storage, both on-prem and in the cloud. With that amount of data and compute within these large virtual environments, they require high quality tool sets that can automate the compute environment for patch and security updates and implement artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to understand the health of their data within these spaces.

In addition to automating the virtual space, many federal agencies are dealing with data overload due to the increase of information. Both structured and unstructured data will grow exponentially over the next several years and understanding the vast amounts of data will require new skills and resources, such as data analytics, to process this information and keep it meaningful, as well as archiving and securing it for the future.

GTI Editors: How does the XaaS model help support the “new normal” of a hybrid workforce?

Jeff Franckhauser: The hybrid workforce has created issues with current IT models in which much of the data, storage, and compute was centered on-prem or within a private data center. Since many institutions have migrated services to the cloud, it is an ongoing challenge to manage both on-prem data resources and off-prem data resources, which may include private or public cloud. With a new mobile workforce and this distributed data model, it has put a strain on many IT staffing efforts, as it is hard to find quality candidates while simultaneously ramping up services and managing or maintaining technology in distributed environments.

In an effort to adjust to the flexible workforce, we are seeing many federal agencies move to a managed cloud and services environment where third parties, such as SHI International, can not only support on-prem IT, but also provide staff augmentation and deliver managed cloud services. This includes MDM (mobile device management) and XaaS, which reduce overhead cost, create better flexibility, and minimize the complexities that come with multiple data services for the IT staff.

GTI Editors: What expertise does SHI International bring to the table with regards to standing up a flexible IT environment for federal agencies?

Richard Place: SHI International offers exceptional talent, has a strengthened understanding of the federal IT market space, including cloud, cloud migration, cloud or on-prem security, and can provide a hyperconverged infrastructure that can adjust to virtualization, compute, and storage. This flexibility is ideal should a security event take place, by offering complete backup and data recovery from ransomware and antivirus attacks which provide data immutability and recovery from an RTO/RPO objective. This type of service and protection is supported over GCC and FedRAMP. Additionally, partners are available under multiple government contracts.

Learn more about how XaaS is supporting modern federal IT infrastructures by downloading this report from ESG titled “Flexible IT Models Drive Efficiency and Innovation” on Government Technology Insider here.