In the digital transformation era, government agencies are at the forefront of a data revolution. As they shift towards data-centric decision-making and technology-driven strategies, the exponential growth in data volume has become a common challenge. According to a recent IDC survey, 51% of respondents anticipate an annual data volume increase ranging from 20% to 99%, with approximately 80% of this growth attributed to unstructured data.
To effectively manage this surge in data, government IT stakeholders must consistently evaluate and invest in their data infrastructure. However, they encounter significant obstacles in building a future-proof and resilient system. These challenges include:
1. Connecting Data Plane and Storage Infrastructure
Efficient management of data storage is crucial for seamless data integration and analytics. Properly implemented storage solutions can optimize decision-making in the data plane, ensuring compliance with operational, security, and legal policies. Choosing storage vendors that offer native connections is imperative for success.
2. Rising Cloud Costs and Shifting Consumption Patterns:
Escalating cloud costs and eceptionally high egress fees are prompting IT decision-makers to reconsider the distribution of workloads between public and private data centers. As a result, data storage consumption is transitioning from exclusive on-premises use to a hybrid model. IT leaders should prioritize scalable and elastic hybrid cloud infrastructure with consumption-based expense models.
3. Increasing Complexity and Data Access Challenges:
The complexity of interconnected cloud platforms threatens to data access and availability, hindering federal digital transformation initiatives. Streamlining systems and platforms processing, analyzing, and sharing data is essential for overcoming these challenges.
4. Skills Shortage:
A shortage of skillscan restrain federal agencies from adopting new approaches to software and cloud development, data science, and AI – approaches that can help them advance and innovate across their entire data ecosystem.
When considering partnerships with data infrastructure vendors, IT decision-makers should prioritize providers that:
- Offer a comprehensive suite of performance and capacity-optimized storage solutions.
- Provide operationally friendly and flexible consumption services for on-premises storage.
- Design solutions for hybrid cloud environments with seamless transitions between on-premises and public cloud.
- Deliver native connections between the data plane and storage infrastructure, promoting storage infrastructure as code.
- Have a strong track record in scaling storage infrastructure to meet the demands of enterprise IT, industrial IoT, and operational technology use cases.
- Invest in research and development for environmentally friendly storage products and sustainability across manufacturing facilities and supply chains.
In conclusion, as IT becomes increasingly central to mission operations in government agencies, a strategic approach to data infrastructure is paramount. By addressing these challenges and partnering with forward-thinking vendors, government IT leaders can lay the foundation for intelligent data extraction and drive successful mission outcomes in this era of digital evolution.
Check out these resources to learn more about modernizing your digital infrastructure:
