How IT Resilience Has Become An Effective Cost-Cutter For State Governments
By Gary Marks, president, Opengear
They say you have to spend money to make money, but having to spend money to save money is oftentimes equally true. In a paper published by Management Science — Do CIO IT Budgets Explain Bigger or Smaller Governments? Theory and Evidence from U.S. State Governments — researchers were able to demonstrate this fact as it relates to government spending on IT. According to the study, “It is estimated that on average, a $1 increase in state CIO budgets is associated with a reduction of as much as $3.49 in state overall expenditures.”
So what exactly accounts for these impressive investment dividends, and what areas of IT are producing the most substantial ROI? Many successful state government technology programs, ones that pay for themselves and then some, do so by adding new efficiencies to common IT processes. IT investments can streamline government processes by introducing online delivery of services and by automating interfaces and systems that were previously handled manually. Innovations that have stormed the private sector, such as the ability to make payments by smartphone, have created expectations among citizens that the public sector should provide comparably easy-to-use services.
The area of IT investment offering the greatest ROI for state government organizations, though, is network infrastructure. The ability to dependably deliver critical services online is at the heart of IT-driven efficiency, dually benefitting both the users and government budgets. At the same time, network failures are extraordinarily expensive.
Gartner has estimated the average cost of network downtime stands at around $300,000 per hour. And failures are common: a study from Symantec and MeriTalk surveying government agencies found that 70 percent had experienced 30 minutes or more of downtime in the past month. The same study reported that real-time access to information saved government field workers an average of 17 hours per week, making network uptime a transformative contributor to a worker’s efficiency. However, only 29 percent of field workers surveyed believed that their IT department fully understood the impact of downtime on their work.
Of course government officials and the public at large were all too aware of the initial failures of HealthCare.gov, the most visible case of network downtime and IT failure in recent memory. But similar failures, and the opportunity represented by the chance to eliminate them, exist at the state government level as well.
Proper investments in network infrastructure can ensure uptime and help governments realize the full potential of those cost-saving efficiencies. With modern networking hardware featuring intelligent out-of-band management technologies, government network engineers and IT administrators can maintain full, centralized access to network equipment even at remote sites and can proactively detect and correct issues before they grow into outages. Additionally, the ability to failover to cellular backup connections when primary connections fail can maintain uninterrupted network functionality, seamlessly diverting data to 4G LTE or 3G cellular networks when necessary. These investments in IT resilience make sure that users can interface with government services in the most efficient ways, government workers can do their jobs efficiently with the always-on real-time access to the systems they require, and government networks in general can keep pace with the rising demands on those IT systems.
The fact that cost-saving efficiencies are so available is welcome news for state governments seeking to provide more sleekly delivered services in the face of tight budgets. By investing what dollars they can spare into IT initiatives, and especially into investments in network infrastructure, these governments will only increase their budgetary maneuverability. As one great government founder once said, “A stitch in time saves nine.” A 21st century Benjamin Franklin advising today’s state governments, though, might put it thusly: “A dollar spent on IT resilience can save you about $3.50.”
Gary Marks is president at Opengear, a company that builds next generation smart solutions for proactively managing and protecting critical IT and communications infrastructure.