From Cloud First to Virtual First

For the past three years, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and speak with CIOs from across the country about their strategic planning efforts for technology. Many smaller local governments have struggled with maintaining their on-premise infrastructure while keeping up with the demands of technology with small workforces and limited budgets. Larger local governments have struggled with similar issues while also focusing on how to architect a technology roadmap that meets the needs of thousands of users and maintains or reduces technical capital investment.

As some of you have heard me describe, Loudoun County (Va.) began the journey to evaluate our technology infrastructure and applications in 2017. After a significant power issue that shut down the County’s primary data center for 26 hours, Loudoun embarked on the development of a technology roadmap that has resulted in the shift of data center infrastructure from County owned facilities, to fit for purpose data centers. We also began, and have focused on, a “cloud first” journey, migrating many of the County’s on-premise applications to cloud hosted solutions such as IaaS and SaaS.

Many local governments have made significant progress in improving their technical infrastructure and applications through similar purposeful strategic planning efforts. COVID-19 is introducing the next wave of technical strategic planning in what I believe is the next focus area for technology planning; the “Virtual First” Technology Roadmap.

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