3 Ways to Embed Innovation in Your IT Roadmap

An interview with Brandon Shopp, Group Vice President of Product, SolarWinds

Although some of the waters state and local governments have had to navigate due to the pandemic have been filled with turmoil and uncertainty, they’ve also offered profound opportunities to rethink and reset their approaches to IT innovation.

“This wasn’t just about adopting the latest tech. It was more strategic than that,” said Brandon Shopp, Group Vice President of Product at SolarWinds, an IT operations management software provider. State, local and education organizations had to rethink how technology enabled accessibility, productivity and secure access to resources across disparate workforces.

“They also had to rethink their IT roadmaps over the next 12 to 24 months,” Shopp said. “Items that were a priority at the start of the pandemic may not be as high-priority now.” Central to this effort is both short- and long-term IT innovation planning. Shopp highlighted several considerations to keep in mind: 1 2

Prioritize flexibility and visibility Any IT investments agencies make should be flexible in terms of how they are deployed and

used, Shopp said. “You should never buy any 3

technology that paints you into a corner. You want to have technology that’s flexible to deploy, based upon where your organization is at today and where it’s going tomorrow.”

Regardless of where employees will be working going forward, be prepared for a future where IT might not be able to troubleshoot tech problems while standing at an employees’ desk or where everyone won’t be logging on to the agency network from a government facility. Eliminating complexity across network operations, legacy product migration, continuous monitoring, and compliance have been core to SolarWinds operations and its government partnerships. One state and local IT/systems administrator echoed those sentiments, touting the software’s ease of use and configuration management. Address evolving risks Remote employees may be sharing Wi-Fi with non-government employees on their home networks. Are agencies prepared to address ongoing challenges with security risks and network performance issues as employees compete for bandwidth when working remotely? Shopp sees innovation in this space as organizations move from security solutions running scans and analysis at the perimeter (think firewalls), to options moving detection and security scans down to the endpoint or device level. Among the drivers is the president’s cybersecurity executive order that calls for adopting a zero-trust security model, where implicit trust of any device, node or user is replaced with continuous verification. The mandate is for federal agencies, but the trickle-down impact will affect state and local governments, too. Embrace your community Innovation happens in the open. Shopp said in the wake of the 2020 SUNBURST cyberattack, SolarWinds is proactively communicating and sharing lessons learned beyond its customers — to include independent software vendors. “We want ultimately what we learned, what we did differently, and what we’re changing to help others learn,” he said. “We can continue to move the ball forward faster if we work together as a community.”