i360Gov, a network of media properties providing news and analysis regarding government business, policy and technology strategy and initiatives, today released new results from a survey designed to gain a greater understanding of the challenges and priorities federal government executives face in managing offsite IT operations.

The resulting report, “How to Securely Support, Meet Demand for 24×7 Global Access to Government Services: Understanding Federal Trends in Branch IT Operations,” highlights the growing costs and challenges of providing adequate performance and security protections at branch locations. It also underscores ongoing resistance by many government agencies to fully embrace cloud services, despite longstanding mandates such as a federal cloud-first policy that are supposed to guide technology procurements.

The report, sponsored by Riverbed and part of i360Gov’s Proof Points series of technology government surveys, uncovers some surprising results:

• 87% of those surveyed expressed that they were “somewhat to very worried” about branch office IT security.
• Nearly a third of respondents (31%) reported that an IT security breach had occurred in the last 12 months.
• 90% of respondents estimate that agency IT spending on branch and/or remote location operations will increase in the next year.
• Despite security concerns, growing costs and ongoing federal cloud-first and data center consolidation initiatives, 65% said they would not consider removing branch IT from offsite locations, which contradicts popular ‘best practice’ thinking regarding the need to centralize all IT operations and virtualize as much as possible to gain better control, management and security.

The survey included a total of 108 executives from a range of federal civilian, defense and intelligence agencies. 82% of respondents work for federal civilian agencies, 5% were from Department of Defense or Intelligence agencies, and 12 % were from government contracting organizations. 45% of respondents work with agencies with more than 30 offsite locations, 31% were from agencies with one to 10 branch office locations, and 15% cited between 11-30 remote locations. Ten of those surveyed were unsure about the total number of offsite locations used by their agencies.

“While corporate entities are benefitting from the cost, control and security advantages that converged infrastructure, virtualization and cloud computing can offer, particularly for IT branch management, federal agencies are still lagging behind,” said Jon Morton, i360Gov’s publisher. “With the right partner and solutions, federal agencies can eliminate many of the challenges of managing IT branch locations, and instantly provision new services and branch locations as warranted to capture significant gains in security, operational efficiencies and resilience for Continuity of Operations Planning (COOP).”

A copy of the full report is available at: http://www.i360gov.com/whitepapers/branch-it-uncertainties-exposed/

About i360Gov

i360Gov is an intelligent network of websites and e-newsletters that provides government business, policy and technology leaders with a single destination for the most important news and analysis regarding their agency strategies and initiatives. Learn more at www.i360gov.com.

About Riverbed

Riverbed is the leader in application performance infrastructure, delivering the most complete platform for the hybrid enterprise to ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues can be proactively detected and resolved before impacting business performance. Riverbed enables hybrid enterprises to transform application performance into a competitive advantage by maximizing employee productivity and leveraging IT to create new forms of operational agility. Learn more at www.riverbed.com.

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