As the adoption of the Digital Government Strategy increases, federal agencies are asking a lot of questions about how to maintain and enhance security. For many, however, the conventional wisdom about the connection between mobility and security is off the mark.

You don't need an engineering degree to understand why: Virtualization moves information from the end device into the cloud. The first thing people panic about when a device is lost is how they can recover their data and applications. This is because traditional computing models place those two critical elements on end devices, which is a risky proposition. The great appeal and promise of the cloud is turning endpoint devices into access points, not the home of critical data.

With the cloud, only the data and the applications matter – not the small piece of hardware in the employee's hand. If going mobile via moving to the cloud did absolutely nothing else, that's an enormous mobile security advance in and of itself.

But it does a lot more. Once management of the device and desktop image moves to the cloud, the endpoints become easier to manage and to secure. Agencies can leverage existing security investments – such as their networks and VPNs for example – and layer on top of those policies for mobile device management, mobile applications management and mobile content management. Applying updates and things like security patches become non-events for both IT and end-users.

Plus, when you remove the data and applications from the device and attach them to a user profile, mobility becomes a natural byproduct of an enhanced security posture. Now that data and those applications – with the assistance of a policy driven framework – can be securely accessed by any device from any location. This means flexibility for users, and security and control for IT – mutually coexisting in harmony.

A recent MeriTalk study showed the Federal government has invested $1.6 billion in workforce mobility initiatives since the launch of the Digital Government Strategy in 2012. Despite that investment, 60 percent of HR managers did not think their agencies could maintain operations in the event of a natural disaster. Increased levels of virtualization can increase continuity of operations for agencies.

On the business efficiency front, the advantages of mobility keep expanding. I recall back when I served as CIO of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in the early 2000s. At the time we were just ramping up the agency's first telework program. The initial ROI objective was very straightforward – we were growing and there wasn't enough physical office space. We wanted to minimize our office space requirements as much as possible.

Telework was very successful in addressing our space limitations. But that was just the first benefit. We quickly noticed other important benefits, like increased morale, improved productivity, better retention rates and lower costs for recruiting and retraining due to employee turnover. Those benefits continue to this day, and the USPTO continues to be a model that observers reference as an example of a telework program in the Federal government that works.

According to the Mobile Work Exchange study, more than 25 percent of federal agency office space is empty at any given time. Despite this, many HR professionals reported that they have lost employees and promising recruits as a result of the lack of telework options, or because those options were too limited.

Much like in the case of security, virtualization accelerates productivity gains. However, in this case, there are some added benefits. A mobility strategy enabled by EUC solutions boosts morale and reduces the costs of both technology and facilities. Here again the main benefit is easy to grasp – accessing the same application you use every day, in the same format, but now from any device in a secure manner!

Virtualizing infrastructure enables critical data and applications to be moved to the cloud, preserving the same functional experience between user and application, and improves user flexibility, security and performance levels. It's the technology powering end user computing, and the reason that the government's mobility initiatives should be aggressive.

About the Author:

Doug Bourgeois is the Vice President, End User Computing, U.S. Public Sector, VMware. He was previously the Director of the National Business Center (NBC)for the Department of the Interior, as well as served as the Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

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