2025 can easily be defined by one word: efficiency. Doing more with less has dominated the nation’s attention while acting as the tip of the spear for the administration’s major priorities to reduce the size and expense of the federal government and advance the modernization of its IT infrastructure.
While the public conversation has largely focused on the cuts to the federal workforce and funding to programs, uncertainty remains about how the administration will procure and deploy new IT technologies to replace legacy systems.
So how should agencies strategize as they conduct their overhaul of the federal government’s technology capabilities?
For an undertaking of this size and scale, federal agencies must keep their buying decisions simple and mission-oriented. Here are key questions that should guide the administration’s decision-making relative to IT modernization for federal agencies:
- Does the technology deliver measurable cost savings?
- Does this technology increase the productivity of federal workers and contractors?
- Does this technology better support the overall mission?
New technology initiatives that can answer each question with a resounding “yes” should be prioritized because the outcomes are cost-effective and measurable against budget, technical standards and frameworks.
Further, existing IT infrastructure should receive the same scrutiny. Here are two additional ways federal agencies can guide their IT modernization purchasing and deployment strategies with efficiency in mind.
Modernizing work from home & return to office
Keeping it simple, federal agencies should address the technologies on which they spend the most and from which their workforce benefits the least. Working with technology that doesn’t quite match the need, has serious flaws, or doesn’t work altogether takes up an unnecessary piece of the budget.
For example, the federal government spends a sizable amount — in the billions — annually in contracts for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies to enable remote work for employees and contractors. The use of VDI started to meet the work from home (WFH) needs during COVID-19. As government employees continue to return to the office, remote access methods like VDI will become more and more of a sunken expense. With little return on investment, it constitutes a spend worth targeting in the efficiency era.
Furthermore, if the government did need to support WFH or hybrid work at scale again, legacy approaches like VDI wouldn’t be the most efficient, productive way to proceed. Agencies could leverage less costly, more effective technologies like enterprise browsers and zero trust network access that create less drag and enable greater productivity.
By analyzing technologies that require significant budget dollars without the requisite value to workforces in departments and agencies, the federal government can create massive cost savings and productivity gains. Moreover, this IT modernization will fundamentally enhance the future of work in the federal government in line with recent Office of Management and Budget memorandum (M-25-21) and other memos regarding generative artificial intelligence and zero trust modernization.
Streamlining is key
By embracing the need for efficiency gains, the administration can consolidate current IT infrastructure into fewer pieces of technology, reducing complexity while increasing savings. This streamlining opportunity is greatest in the use, storage and privacy of regulated data, a problem that has confounded departments and agencies for decades.
Legacy approaches to enabling and securing regulated data including personally identifiable information, protected health information, controlled unclassified information and international traffic in arms are notorious for taking up too much budget and manpower. They haven’t scaled to meet the amount of data being generated, especially when including GenAI tools and services.
For 25 years, users have largely had the ability to use and store data however they decide. The results are expensive and underwhelming. Continued ransomware, data spillage, insider threats, and spiraling regulatory and audit costs dominate daily headlines. Expenditures on data loss prevention technology align the labor with the security operations center (SOC), not with the data owner, which turns into an expensive guessing game.
The use of modernized technology like enterprise browsers and zero trust network access not only lowers costs but dramatically reduces labor, complexity and audit considerations. The value of the data itself will dictate to users where it can be used and stored rather than relying on the user’s risk awareness, a SOC operator’s policies, or any other haphazard approach. Agencies can gain control over least data privilege, password and privileged account management, digital experience, insider threat assessments, zero trust improvements and dozens of other factors in the most widely used tool in IT today.
With this simple, modern approach, the government can address major technology pain points faced by federal agencies and contractors, to enable greater productivity and reduce costs.
In the efficiency era, what better measure for success in modernizing the IT capabilities of our federal agencies could there possibly be?
Scott Montgomery is vice president of U.S. Federal for Island.
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