What does it mean to be resilient? Resilience is something most of us strive for—and something the world seems to demand more of with each passing day. In recent years, we’ve witnessed natural disasters, political instability, social unrest, and a global pandemic. Resilience refers to the ability to quickly recover from any shock and adapt to better mitigate the impacts of future shocks. This is particularly important for government organizations that provide much needed services during times of crisis.

While private sector firms focus on addressing their customers’ needs, government organizations are responsible for providing services that safeguard the rights of their constituents, protect the most vulnerable, and provide better outcomes for their residents. From fighting human trafficking to improving child nutrition, state and local agencies play an important role in people’s daily lives and well-being. When a disruption happens, real people feel its effects.

To consistently provide resident services, government organizations must make data, information, knowledge, and intelligence available to its operational, tactical, and strategic staff when and where they need it. This means ensuring that your data can “bounce back” whenever there is a compromise, disruption, or breach so stakeholders can regain access to accurate, timely data ASAP.  This is called data resilience and it must be built from the ground up.

Improving data resilience through modernization

Modernization offers one pathway to greater data resilience, as cloud-based technologies tend to have both agility and resilience built-in. But while cloud services have been commercially available for quite some time, full adoption of cloud-based products and services among public sector organizations is exceptionally low compared to their private sector counterparts. Furthermore, legacy technologies (some greater than 20 years old) employed by the public sector to run critical business systems are a significant obstacle to resilience.

Improving data resilience may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. To build resilient data architectures, government organizations should do several things:

• Focus on building capabilities instead of systems. Don’t think about business functions in silos. Instead, consider each business function as a capability that contributes to overall success while utilizing common functions and leveraging shared data. Understanding how service delivery is supported by the various business processes helps to connect the dots from data collection to actionable insights to government services to resident outcomes.
• Choose the right storage options. Government organizations should choose underlying storage components that prioritize the quality of both the data itself as well as the accompanying metadata while having the ability to seamlessly scale or replace storage options. Once again, these attributes are characteristic of cloud-based technologies that take most of the computing, processing, transfer, and storage activities off-site to secure, managed environments.
• Choose multiple availability zones for backups and data storage. These different zones must span multiple geographical regions with underlying infrastructure that is both mutually exclusive and redundant.
• Prioritize the most critical services. Modernization doesn’t have to happen in one fell swoop. Instead of using a “lift and shift” approach to modernization and cloud-adoption, organizations should document which business processes contribute quality data used to deliver their most critical services. This takes a great deal of effort, but results in business processes that are tightly integrated with the outcomes the organization desires to deliver.

The unfortunate reality is that disruptions do happen. It’s only logical to be prepared. While network or connectivity failures are the most common source of service interruptions, these four steps will help government organizations prepare for any disruptions that come their way.

At Voyatek, we believe every modernization effort should begin and end with a single-minded focus on outcomes. But outcomes cannot be achieved during a disruption. Thus, modernization efforts must consider resilience from day one. Truly resilient data architectures are built around the ability to deliver government services no matter what.

Voyatek has helped countless state and local government agencies build resilient data architectures. If you’re looking to modernize your IT stack to improve data resilience, contact us today.