The Digital Fabric Powering Our Communities
Wanda hops online to schedule her behind-the-wheel test for her driver’s license, but the website doesn’t seem to be working normally. No matter how many times she refreshes, the homepage only partially loads.
Paul wants to attend this week’s city council meeting and heads to the city website to confirm the time, but it appears to be completely down. He just gets a blank screen with a “404 service unavailable” error message.
Jenny sits in her police patrol car, trying to pull up a critical piece of information in her cloud-based records management software, but it’s not loading. The third-party service seems to be experiencing an outage, or maybe issues with the uplink or gateway that are impacting the car’s built-in Wi-Fi.
Wanda, Paul, and Jenny’s stories illustrate how so many critical government services for citizens and staff are fully digital or rely heavily on digital components—and how outages can disrupt these services.
Whether at the local, regional, or national level, ITOps teams at government agencies and organizations strive to make sure that citizens can access services seamlessly and staff can continue to do their jobs—all with the goal of helping maintain the well-being and safety of their communities. However, the responsibility of managing an IT environment for a government or a related agency is complicated by the fact that, like many organizations today, they often rely on a complex digital service delivery chain that includes both owned and unowned environments.
ITOps teams are typically well equipped to manage their owned environments, which include elements like Wi-Fi access points, switches, routers, and internally-hosted applications. However, these teams have little to no control over their unowned environment, which consists of third-party providers (like content delivery networks [CDNs], Internet service providers [ISPs], and cloud providers) and core Internet services (like the domain name system [DNS]).
To guard against the impact of Internet outages, ITOps teams need end-to-end visibility into every part of this service delivery chain, including third-party providers. As the U.S. General Services Administration emphasized in its guide on cloud operations best practices, teams need to have strategies and practices in place “to ensure the availability, resilience, and uninterrupted operation of cloud-based systems and services.” This includes designing processes “to mitigate the impact of disruptions (e.g., cyber-attacks, system failure, and service outages)” when incidents do occur.
Let’s explore some common ways outages can affect state and local institutions and dive deeper into what teams can do to proactively prevent these disruptions—and mitigate any negative effects when they do pop up.
Supporting Well Being With Seamless Citizen-facing Services
People rely on a myriad of government websites and applications for critical services related to public safety, transportation, social services, health, and more. Any outage or disruption that affects the digital platforms powering these citizen-facing services could make them harder for people to access, inhibiting everything from contacting emergency services to obtaining a new drivers’ license or filing their taxes.
In recent real-life examples, issues with a software update brought down 911 services, and an outage caused by a hardware failure impacted a county’s network—rendering court and official records systems inaccessible.
Citizens and government staff also expect seamless digital experiences in government buildings, public services facilities, and across the community. Outages challenge agencies’ ability to deliver on these expectations and can hamper connectivity that’s essential for so much of modern life.
To guard against issues like these, ITOps teams should proactively monitor for potential problems so they can efficiently address issues before they impact users. Teams need robust digital resilience plans in place so they can quickly activate backup processes and help mitigate a disruption’s effects. This requires a robust understanding of their digital service delivery chain and all dependencies, identifying single points of failure and other problems that need fixing. With this understanding, teams can also more quickly pinpoint the cause of an outage and launch proper mitigation efforts.
Teams also need to create plans to help guard against outages in high-traffic seasons like Tax Day when demand on their systems will be especially high. To the extent possible, IT teams should run tests beforehand to assess whether the system can handle the increased load. And if unexpected problems occur, they should have backup plans and mitigation strategies prepared to roll out as appropriate.
Additionally, whether an outage happens on Tax Day or just a normal Tuesday, teams should be prepared to provide clear, prompt communication to the public about what’s going on, recommended workarounds, and resolution timing.
Smooth Work Experiences—No Matter Where Their Job Takes Them
From city planners to police officers, many civil servants have jobs that require them to be on the go during their work day. In addition to making sure all in-office technology is up and running, government IT organizations prioritize delivering seamless experiences with all the technology needed for this hybrid work. This includes collaboration solutions like video conferencing, messaging, and more.
When an outage impacts one of the services that employees rely on, ITOps have to efficiently assess whether the issue lies with the user’s device, the Internet service provider (ISP), the VPN gateway, a SaaS application, or somewhere else. Is it an isolated issue or more widespread? Once they understand the outage’s fault domain and scope, teams need to escalate the issue to the responsible party for resolution. Having data that shows where and when the issue has occurred is invaluable in these instances.
Maintaining the Highest Level of Security
Security also represents a top priority for government agencies that are often dealing with sensitive information and citizens’ personal data. ITOps teams at government organizations need to monitor where their traffic is flowing to make sure it’s taking expected paths, matching the organization’s data sovereignty expectations, to the relevant servers. Unexpected traffic behavior or drops in performance can signal a potential security breach, such as a network hijack.
This scenario played out at a U.S.-based public university last year. When the university’s IT teams noticed some unusual performance in their server infrastructure, they proactively brought their servers, networks, and systems offline while they investigated the problem. During this troubleshooting, they found that some of their servers were infected. For this reason, ITOps teams need to keep a careful eye on any outages or disruptions to minimize any security risks or stop an attack in progress.
Outage Monitoring Checklist: What Government Organizations Should Watch
Whether your department focuses on justice, public safety, transportation, social services, or
sustainability, optimizing the uptime and performance of your network and services is critical to delivering on your mission.
To help guide your IT team’s efforts as you manage a complex ecosystem of owned and unowned environments, see this suggested checklist of areas that you should consider prioritizing. For each item listed below, make sure you’re monitoring overall performance, including the health of relevant APIs, cloud services, and other tools needed for the service to function properly.
- Apps & Websites: Give citizens and staff seamless experiences by emulating app service interactions to catch possible issues and stop outages before they happen. Monitor metrics like HTTP response and page load times so you have a sense for what’s normal, and what might indicate a more serious issue.
- Hybrid Work: Make sure staff members whose roles require them to work on-the-go have the necessary infrastructure for remote and hybrid work experiences. Proactively monitor elements such as VPN gateways, Wi-Fi, and VDI environments for any issues.
- Internet, Data Center, & DNS Providers: Put monitoring in place for the main IT services and applications across your infrastructure and cloud—keeping in mind all branches and locations under your purview.
- SaaS: Pay attention to B2B connectivity and API performance from external digital services, including platforms for e-governance, citizen engagement, and administrative tasks.