The 3 Tenets of Enabling a Remote Government Workforce

Even as a possible end to the coronavirus pandemic is on the horizon, there’s no doubt that telework is here to stay for the government workforce. In many ways, 2020 served as an unintentional proof of concept, demonstrating that workers can be just as productive away from the office as inside it. Going forward, many employees are likely to begin looking for the flexibility and ease that remote work offers even as the pandemic wanes, turning many previously in-person government workplaces into hybrid ones.

Now, as agencies begin to look out at a more permanent remote future — at least for some of their staff — it has come time to consider the infrastructure modernization that will need to occur in order to ensure each agency can remain both secure and productive. That’s a tougher road for some agencies than for others.

“Prior to the pandemic, some agencies had already adopted the cloud, moved many of their workloads there, embraced zero trust and were forward-leaning in terms of their infrastructure. But a much larger number were not all prepared,” says Sean Frazier, Federal CSO at Okta. “These agencies were suddenly forced to very quickly stand-up legacy services and scale themselves so that people could connect to data centers, bulk up VPN concentrators so all users could enter the firewall from the outside.”

Where that leaves agencies now, says Frazier, is much further down the road to modernization than they would have been otherwise. But in order to serve both an evolving workforce and ensure they can weather any coming storms, agencies will need to continue down that road and change both their infrastructure and their mindset accordingly. A focus on security will be key to those efforts.

“Agencies need to modernize access — no one can work if they don’t have access — but also security, because attackers never standstill. While we’re contemplatin