Welcome to the final blog in our government modernization series.

In our first blog, Rethinking Government Modernization in the Efficiency Era, we highlighted the importance modernization plays in eliminating key technical debt to achieve federal mission efficiency, optimization and resilience.

Our second blog, Federal Modernization and Beyond the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), examined the impact of the DOGE mandates and other governmental guidance as well as the need they create for transformative rethinking of traditional federal government approaches to modernization and mission-enablement.

This blog addresses today’s pragmatic need faced by most federal agencies:  identifying infrastructure modernization strategies that are optimized for success in their current brownfield environments. 

Keys to Infrastructure Modernization in Today’s AI World

Every organization has infrastructure that’s critical to their mission success and resiliency.  And nowhere is this truer than in federal government agencies.   

The arrival of mature, AI-enabled software-defined infrastructure is a game-changer enabling greater resiliency for your mission critical infrastructures.  This constantly evolving “intelligent infrastructure” is continually being enhanced with new features, functions and capabilities, thus helping ensure robust infrastructure resiliency against evolving threats.  This IT modernization approach supports and sustains transformational efforts by eliminating technical debt on an ongoing basis, thereby helping future-proof your mission-critical Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) infrastructure investments.  In addition, by being able to continually improve your capabilities by leveraging the R&D investments of industry, agencies can be even more effective against evolving adversarial efforts especially at the edge. 

Modernized Infrastructure Delivers on Efficiency Guidance

Modernized infrastructures provide the means to deliver the most granular visibility and analytics to enable advanced enterprise automation and orchestration across both IT and OT assets. Data and telemetry delivered from a modern infrastructure asset (e.g., intelligent network switch or router) can see and understand every communication packet and is foundational to dynamic asset visibility and real-time, automated and continuous monitoring. In addition, the ability to detect anomalous activity in real time provides the means to deliver dynamic enterprise infrastructure optimization as well as protect against and minimize adverse security impacts.

A modernized, enterprise-wide, software-defined infrastructure is essential in helping deliver the outcomes that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is trying to realize and perpetuate by significantly reducing the costs of operating mission critical infrastructure (the most expensive component), in addition to future-proofing software-defined infrastructure capabilities with new features and functions being delivered with each new version release.  For mission-essential federal agency operations, the government’s focus on the elimination of technical debt and modernization can result in vastly improved enterprise automation and orchestration, thereby helping with enhanced resilience and improving overall mission critical efficiency. It also meets key Agency RIF and Reorganization Plans requirements by significantly reducing the number of personnel required to perform key operational and run functions.  

It has never been more important for agency enterprises to eliminate their technical debt that constrains enterprise automation and orchestration. Modern infrastructure driven by advanced AI/ML algorithms and controllers provide enhanced telemetry insights and orchestration, while delivering significant labor efficiency optimization, major infrastructure “run” cost reductions as well as improves user experiences and significantly reduces the #1 cause of critical infrastructure downtime – human error.

Concentrating DOGE modernization efforts across essential agency cross-architectural solutions and services can vastly improve the enterprise automation and orchestration of that agency’s operations and thus enhance agency mission critical infrastructure and mission resilience and improve overall mission efficiency and effectiveness.

Modernizing Brownfield Infrastructure Environments

Addressing the current state of most existing government infrastructure environments is one of the toughest challenges agencies face when trying to modernize infrastructure across their enterprise. Most organizations need at least a partial infrastructure upgrade to fully support and leverage modern enterprise AI/ML software controllers to deliver optimal automation and cross-architecture orchestration.  When you’ve been refreshing or modernizing only one/fifth of your essential infrastructure each year, it is most likely not ready to deliver enterprise-wide full stack optimization capabilities in this relatively new software-defined infrastructure world.  In fact, this traditional and common-place refresh strategy often prevents deployment of enterprise-wide AI/ML-enabled automation and orchestration, especially if budget constraints have caused agencies to miss some of those technology refreshes and some of your infrastructure is approaching end of security support or even end of life.  Automation and orchestration across traditional IT silos as well as across both IT and OT domains is crucial to achieving these objectives.  This cross-architecture modernization approach is essential to delivering greater mission resilience.   

A New Partnership Approach with Industry

This modernization approach is optimally achieved through a new type of partnership with industry focused on delivering the modernized infrastructure upgrades that are so critical to enabling more effective cross-architecture orchestration to enhance enterprise mission outcomes and directly address DOGE guidance.  

Working more closely with innovative industry partners to deploy enterprise-wide infrastructure upgrades that immediately begin to deliver benefits from enterprise visibility and analytics, as well as automation and orchestration, is an ideal option for many organizations and agencies in search of efficient ways to address their ongoing organization spending and labor cuts. The real power of this approach is the ability to deploy the entire enterprise solution right away to gain the immediate enterprise mission and ROI benefits, as well as gaining budget predictability with multi-year locked-in pricing.   

Another critical area for agencies to fully optimize is the means to not only leverage, but drive industry corporate R&D, capital use and “XaaS” offering investments to produce needed agency capabilities, functionality and outcomes. Your partner should be facilitating and influencing new features and function development to address government clients’ needs.  This kind of partnership yields tremendous advantages, especially in this era of the governments’ laser focus on enhanced efficiency and labor reductions. 

This transformation-enabling modernization strategy significantly reduces operational, and maintenance labor costs and provides for much greater efficiency and effectiveness in delivering key mission-enabling infrastructure capabilities. In addition, new and continually improving feature and function upgrades are built-in to future-proof your agency’s modernization journey.  And much of what you need to execute this approach you likely already own.

The NWN Federal Perspective

This modernization approach builds on NWN’s mission-focused philosophy of optimizing capabilities and support tailored to each of our clients, as our proven Experience Management Platform (EMP) services model in the commercial and state and local markets have demonstrated.  And the addition of the InterVision acquisition two months ago further enhances NWN and our Federal team’s ability to deliver AI-powered, hybrid cloud managed IT infrastructure capabilities, optimization, and services across your enterprise.   

Most importantly, NWN Federal’s innovative modernization and optimization methodology aligns with DOGE’s modernization emphasis by delivering infrastructure solutions that automate and orchestrate capabilities, reduce costs, and boost productivity, thereby helping agencies meet EO and ARRP driven modernization needs and requirements. 

Bottom Line Impact

Software-defined enterprise infrastructure is at the heart of this new modernization approach, delivering never before seen agility and continuous evolution of networking and infrastructure capabilities so crucial to enhancing security, business outcomes and mission success.

The outcomes that the Department of Government Efficiency is trying to deliver can be realized with a modernized, enterprise-wide, software-defined infrastructure that significantly reduces the costs of operating mission critical infrastructure (the most expensive component), as well as future-proofing software-defined infrastructure capabilities with new features and functions being delivered with each new version release. 

Next Steps

We invite governmental agencies to reach out for further discussions on modernization, resilience and a new way to partner with industry to acquire modernized enterprise infrastructure and services designed for this new DOGE era. 

Connect with a federal expert at NWN Federal for a follow-on conversation.