Improving customer experience has been a consistent driver of public sector IT investment over the last three years. The applications and hardware adopted by agencies are crucial for reaching this goal, but both need a modernized network. Today’s applications have created a significant burden on agencies to add network capacity; not only are agencies realizing exponential growth in application access, but the amount of bandwidth needed to reach and use those applications is also skyrocketing. Some agencies have begun modernizing their networks to meet this need, while others are just reaching this point, but all share the goal of improving network performance to meet their missions.
Network modernization on this scale takes planning and forethought to implement successfully. We’ve identified three steps to help agencies design a plan that takes their unique needs and goals into account. With these considerations as a starting point, network modernization can provide government agencies with an avenue to deliver secure, reliable, and ultimately exceptional customer experiences.
1. Identify Your Need
Before undertaking a network modernization program, it’s important to understand why it’s necessary and what problems it will solve. Intuitive interfaces and error-free interactions are at the heart of the type of citizen experiences that agencies need to deliver, but problems with infrastructure directly affect those experiences as well. In fact, the primary challenge posed by maintaining a legacy network is sunsetting existing platforms and infrastructure. T1 services, POTS lines, and legacy voice applications are all built on older infrastructure—in many cases this infrastructure is more than 50 years old—which has reached its end-of-life.
When legacy networks experience an outage, recovery isn’t as simple as flipping a switch or re-routing network traffic. “If you have an outage due to equipment failure, that network is not coming back,” explained Campbell Palmer, Vice President, Public Sector Solution Architecture at Lumen. “You’re going to have to order a new circuit, and that downtime you’re incurring poses a significant risk. If it’s a mission-critical facility, you can be left standing with no connectivity.” Offices cut off from the network become unable to communicate with the rest of the agency and in a worst-case scenario from availability to the public, preventing essential information and mission critical resources from reaching agency employees and citizens.
Network modernization eliminates these devastating outages while delivering high availability and capacity. Modern networks contain multiple means of connectivity to maintain their resiliency even as they reduce the amount of touch a user has inside the network. Agencies can also improve employees’ user experience with a modern network reducing latency regardless of whether the employee is connecting at the core or the edge of the network. Pushing network traffic and configuration to endpoint devices allows for immediate availability, while connectivity between those devices ensures employees follow the optimal path for the service they are trying to reach.
2. Understand Your Priorities
To realize these benefits while keeping costs and time to implementation down, agencies need a modernization plan that considers several factors. Palmer identified that the most important element when deciding where to modernize is mission criticality. “Offices and locations that are mission critical should be given priority,” he shared. “You also want to consider the overall amount of resiliency you want in each individual location. There are some facilities where it’s okay to incur an outage and failover to a lesser means of access for a short period of time—effectively keeping the lights on, but for other locations, maintaining high connectivity is non-negotiable.”
3. Know Where Your Data Is
Forming a plan also requires a deep understanding of where applications reside in order to ensure interoperability between those locations and endpoint devices. Palmer shared that applications are becoming more distributed, meaning that connectivity across the agency’s entire network is necessary for users to reach essential tools and data. Estimating the amount of network capacity needed to access those applications will help facilitate a better understanding of how and where to modernize first.
Increasing network capacity and ensuring reliability with a modernized network enables agencies to improve user experience for both employees and citizens. Starting with the networks that are most critical to mission success, assessing network capacity needs, and maintaining interoperability between networks, locations, and devices can help agencies support the applications and hardware they employ to deliver exceptional service.