Government agencies are attracting new IT talent with remote work policies — is their technology ready?

Government agencies have big digital dreams: They want to provide citizens with seamless online experiences — experiences that are just as intuitive and convenient as getting picked up with a ride-sharing app or ordering with one click from a large e-commerce company. Standing in their way, however, is a major barrier: an IT staffing shortage. 

To address this issue, many agencies are turning to remote work policies as a way to expand their talent pools and fill IT positions that will support infrastructure upgrades and the creation of exceptional online experiences. While remote work is not something they have typically embraced, the pandemic has forced many agencies to allow it, and they’ve changed their tune after seeing firsthand that employees can be productive and provide constituent services from home.

To support the shift to a remote IT staff, government agencies need the right technology solutions. Here are three things agencies should consider:

Enable seamless collaboration

IT staff working remotely should be able to connect and collaborate with colleagues just as if they were in an office environment — in other words, it should be seamless and easy.

To facilitate this, many municipalities turn towards cloud-based collaboration solutions. One major benefit of these solutions is they eliminate common concerns related to remote work such as employee availability. For example, we partner with government agencies to enable a cloud-based Unified Communications (UC) solution. With UC, government employees are reachable no matter where they are with one phone number that automatically reroutes office calls to their mobile devices.

In addition, other collaboration tools are brought together within the intuitive UC platform so employees don’t have to move back and forth between multiple devices and applications. Our UC solution also integrates with popular tools including instant messaging.

Scale to support

As agencies deploy more remote working solutions and use more cloud-based collaboration tools, their network bandwidth demands grow. As a result, they’re becoming increasingly dependent on scalable network connectivity solutions because bandwidth can be easily dialed up to support distributed work environments. We’re helping them meet this need with Dedicated Fiber Internet (DFI), Ethernet and other scalable connectivity solutions.

Protect when they connect

Working from home increases the number of devices connecting to government networks, which increases security risks by providing more opportunities for cybercriminals.

Even though government agencies already have network security protocols and systems in place to protect constituents’ personal data, we’ve seen our government clients use more caution to mitigate the risks of staff connecting remotely. We’re helping them do this with security solutions that allow employee and citizen data to remain secure remotely using site-to-site and VPN connections, and safeguard networks with a reliable firewall that identifies and blocks Internet threats.

Learn more about how we support flexible work environments and help government agencies overcome modernization concerns.