With all the upheavals of the last two years federal agencies are figuring out what the future of work will look like. According to the Remote Employee Experience Index, 72 percent of agency employees surveyed noted that they preferred a hybrid work model. With hybrid work becoming the norm, agencies should consider how the hybrid cloud can support the new work environment.
To deliver on the mission from anywhere at any time, hybrid workers need agencies to identify solutions that not only improve connection and collaboration between workers, but also provide a secure, adaptable environment. “Open hybrid multi-cloud offers the flexibility necessary for business innovation and improved customer experience, while also addressing security and cost concerns,” according to IBM’s “Government On Open Hybrid Multicloud” report. “It can serve as the necessary foundation for a modern government architecture by enabling internal and external data accessibility, workload flexible portability, and effective interoperability of analytics.”
According to a 2020 CEO study, 56 percent of the CEOs surveyed said enhanced operational agility and flexibility is their top priority in the next two to three years. The hybrid cloud establishes a platform where agencies can quickly become agile and address new challenges affecting their environment. Moreover, a recent study from IBM states that agencies can more quickly transform IT operations to better support agility and collaboration by adopting a hybrid cloud.
The flexibility of this new environment is critical when it comes to cybersecurity and mitigating threats. For example, attackers took advantage of the shift to remote work during the early days of the pandemic to initiate phishing scams and ransomware attacks. Now, as agencies formalize their hybrid work environments, they need to be sure that security remains at the forefront. By modernizing with the hybrid cloud, agencies can keep their data protected by hosting it in one environment that can be securely managed both on and off-premise. Additionally, the hybrid cloud reduces the complexity between the public and private clouds by removing the third-party element.
The hybrid cloud platforms are flexible to fit the needs of the agency and maintain security over its data. As hybrid work transforms agencies, IT environment capabilities need to remain flexible and continue to support innovation in pursuit of mission success.
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