“The departments of Agriculture and Veterans Affairs are transforming IT infrastructures to strengthen cybersecurity, telework and virtual services.
‘We need to have resilient and strong IT infrastructures to support this new environment that we’re in,’ said Gary Washington, CIO at USDA, at a media event…”
“’There’s an emphasis on securing the endpoints and ensuring that our employees are secure in their remote locations,’ Washington said. ‘It’s great that, as a government, we came together so quickly. People were able to not miss a beat and continue to perform their day-to-day activities.’
The VA has also driven similar initiatives, having spent the past few years developing its digital transformation strategy that helped the department quickly respond to the sudden demands amid the pandemic.
‘We were able to quickly pivot our priorities to establish telework capabilities, as well as scale up our telehealth solutions for veterans that now needed to access healthcare in a new way,’ said VA CTO Charles Worthington.
Plus, productivity increased, Worthington added. Instead of developing new tools, VA matured current systems and processes, and many of the core investments in VA’s infrastructure and service delivery capabilities accommodated the rapid change in requirements…”
“’USDA has become more analytical. We’re emphasizing the use of data more, and people are sharing the analytics. We’re transitioning to this environment where we’re making decisions based on the same source of truth with data,’ Washington said…” Read the full article here.
Source: IT Infrastructure Investments Drive Remote Collaboration – By Sarah Sybert, May 6, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
