June 25, 2026
Accomplish the Mission With Federal IT Infrastructure Modernization
With the right modernization strategy, federal agencies can simplify complex environments, strengthen security and adopt emerging technologies that support their most important work.
CDW Expert
Federal IT modernization is no longer a discretionary initiative. Agency leaders must support complex missions while managing fragmented environments, evolving security requirements, workforce gaps, and rising expectations from citizens and government leaders — often while working under mandates to reduce spending. Cloud, cybersecurity and infrastructure investments are foundational to IT modernization, as these can all reduce complexity and improve resilience while also supporting emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
It is important to connect these investments to specific outcomes related to the coworker and citizen experience, and agencies can demonstrate the effectiveness of their IT modernization programs by tracking key metrics related to their missions. Modernization is an ongoing effort that requires a strategic, phased approach. Many agencies turn to a trusted partner to help assess current environments, migrate resources, update infrastructure and measure success over time.
Federal IT modernization is no longer a discretionary initiative. Agency leaders must support complex missions while managing fragmented environments, evolving security requirements, workforce gaps, and rising expectations from citizens and government leaders — often while working under mandates to reduce spending. Cloud, cybersecurity and infrastructure investments are foundational to IT modernization, as these can all reduce complexity and improve resilience while also supporting emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI).
It is important to connect these investments to specific outcomes related to the coworker and citizen experience, and agencies can demonstrate the effectiveness of their IT modernization programs by tracking key metrics related to their missions. Modernization is an ongoing effort that requires a strategic, phased approach. Many agencies turn to a trusted partner to help assess current environments, migrate resources, update infrastructure and measure success over time.
Federal IT leaders are in what can sometimes feel like an impossible position. They are tasked with delivering IT for extremely complex operations, but they must do so in an environment where technology is advancing faster than ever. Expectations from citizens and government leaders are rising faster than budget allocations. And IT leaders must devise and implement their modernization strategies amid evolving security mandates and increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats.
Most federal IT environments are highly fragmented, with a mix of legacy infrastructure, updated tools and brand-new solutions. This creates a different kind of complexity from legacy technology alone, as agencies must continue to modernize without breaking the workflows that still depend on these mixed environments.
Until recently, it would have been accurate to say that federal IT leaders were “under pressure” to pursue modernization. However, modernization is no longer seen as a discretionary initiative that can be put off for another day. Rather, it is now simply an expected part of the work.
The rise of AI has created new opportunities, challenges and threats. For agencies with unified data stores and modern data center infrastructure, AI can help uncover hidden insights and improve employee productivity. However, organizations that attempt to implement the technology without a solid strategy may end up spending significant time and money on pilot projects that never make their way into production. Additionally, cyberattackers are using AI tools to discover new zero-day threats, build exploit packages and increase the sophistication of social engineering attacks such as phishing.
Workforce challenges introduce another layer of urgency. Turnover and skills gaps make it more difficult to maintain existing systems and adopt emerging technologies, and agencies must compete with the private sector for scarce cybersecurity and IT talent. Meanwhile, much of the federal workforce is retirement-eligible, and these workers will take their vast institutional knowledge with them when they go, in some cases leaving behind colleagues who may not know how to support legacy technologies.
As ever, agencies must fit their modernization plans within the constraints of their budgets. According to MeriTalk, 100% of surveyed federal CIOs are pursuing cost-cutting measures, 90% cite budget constraints or funding uncertainty as a major challenge, and 80% say they are working under explicit cost savings mandates. As a result, modernization efforts are increasingly tied to operational efficiency. This means agencies must not only adopt new tools to improve performance but also work to consolidate systems, reduce manual work and ensure that every IT dollar contributes to measurable mission-related outcomes.
60%
The percentage of federal CIOs who say that legacy systems are a major roadblock to their technology priorities
Source: MeriTalk, “FY26 Federal CIO Forecast,” October 2025
CDW can help your agency build out a modernized infrastructure that supports the mission.
Federal IT leaders are in what can sometimes feel like an impossible position. They are tasked with delivering IT for extremely complex operations, but they must do so in an environment where technology is advancing faster than ever. Expectations from citizens and government leaders are rising faster than budget allocations. And IT leaders must devise and implement their modernization strategies amid evolving security mandates and increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats.
Most federal IT environments are highly fragmented, with a mix of legacy infrastructure, updated tools and brand-new solutions. This creates a different kind of complexity from legacy technology alone, as agencies must continue to modernize without breaking the workflows that still depend on these mixed environments.
Until recently, it would have been accurate to say that federal IT leaders were “under pressure” to pursue modernization. However, modernization is no longer seen as a discretionary initiative that can be put off for another day. Rather, it is now simply an expected part of the work.
The rise of AI has created new opportunities, challenges and threats. For agencies with unified data stores and modern data center infrastructure, AI can help uncover hidden insights and improve employee productivity. However, organizations that attempt to implement the technology without a solid strategy may end up spending significant time and money on pilot projects that never make their way into production. Additionally, cyberattackers are using AI tools to discover new zero-day threats, build exploit packages and increase the sophistication of social engineering attacks such as phishing.
Workforce challenges introduce another layer of urgency. Turnover and skills gaps make it more difficult to maintain existing systems and adopt emerging technologies, and agencies must compete with the private sector for scarce cybersecurity and IT talent. Meanwhile, much of the federal workforce is retirement-eligible, and these workers will take their vast institutional knowledge with them when they go, in some cases leaving behind colleagues who may not know how to support legacy technologies.
As ever, agencies must fit their modernization plans within the constraints of their budgets. According to MeriTalk, 100% of surveyed federal CIOs are pursuing cost-cutting measures, 90% cite budget constraints or funding uncertainty as a major challenge, and 80% say they are working under explicit cost savings mandates. As a result, modernization efforts are increasingly tied to operational efficiency. This means agencies must not only adopt new tools to improve performance but also work to consolidate systems, reduce manual work and ensure that every IT dollar contributes to measurable mission-related outcomes.
CDW can help your agency build out a modernized infrastructure that supports the mission.
Federal IT Modernization: By the Numbers
81%
The percentage of federal leaders who give their agency an “excellent” or “good” rating for performance in updating legacy IT systems
Source: EY, “Federal Trends Report: The Modernization and Efficiency Era,” April 2026
22%
The percentage of federal leaders who say their agency has reached the “post-transformation” journey of its IT modernization, with the rest in the mid-transformation, planning or legacy stages
Source: EY, “Federal Trends Report: The Modernization and Efficiency Era,” April 2026
80%
The percentage of federal CIOs who say that staffing and skills gaps are a major challenge for the 2026 fiscal year, up from 67% the year before
Source: MeriTalk, “FY26 Federal CIO Forecast,” October 2025
Federal IT Modernization: By the Numbers
81%
The percentage of federal leaders who give their agency an “excellent” or “good” rating for performance in updating legacy IT systems
Source: EY, “Federal Trends Report: The Modernization and Efficiency Era,” April 2026
22%
The percentage of federal leaders who say their agency has reached the “post-transformation” journey of its IT modernization, with the rest in the mid-transformation, planning or legacy stages
Source: EY, “Federal Trends Report: The Modernization and Efficiency Era,” April 2026
80%
The percentage of federal CIOs who say that staffing and skills gaps are a major challenge for the 2026 fiscal year, up from 67% the year before
Source: MeriTalk, “FY26 Federal CIO Forecast,” October 2025
- BUILDING THE FOUNDATION
- METRICS FOR MISSION-FOCUSED IT
- MODERNIZATION IN ACTION
A modern IT environment must be built on a flexible, secure and scalable foundation. This begins with cloud adoption, robust cybersecurity tools and modernized infrastructure that supports distributed workloads and data-driven operations. Agency leaders should not treat each of these concerns as stand-alone priorities, but rather leverage the interdependent nature of their cloud, security and infrastructure investments. Together, these foundational components can enable agility, resilience and innovation while also supporting data safety and compliance.
CLOUD: Although the public cloud is now largely a mature technology, agencies continue to experience cloud-related challenges. Data privacy regulations and data sovereignty issues, along with cost concerns, have led organizations across industries to repatriate some workloads to on-premises infrastructure. The rise of AI is accelerating this trend, with organizations recognizing that the most valuable applications of the technology often involve data that cannot live in the public cloud for reasons ranging from security to latency.
Migration is a cornerstone of any cloud strategy, as it enables agencies to quickly reduce reliance on legacy systems while improving scalability and availability. However, leaders must carefully consider whether a simple “lift and shift” migration will help achieve the agency’s goals, or if a more advanced application modernization effort may be needed. To make this determination, leaders must clearly understand their workloads and use cases, as well as how they connect to desired outcomes. Many agencies’ IT resources are now scattered across hybrid cloud and multicloud environments, creating a further need to reduce complexity and improve integration.
SECURITY: Cybersecurity must be a core priority for any modernization effort. In addition to protecting their agencies against traditional cyberthreats, leaders must now also defend against highly targeted ransomware attacks, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and attacks focused on disrupting supply chains and other critical operational functions. While moving to the cloud transfers risk away from on-premises infrastructure, a migration doesn’t automatically eliminate or even reduce vulnerabilities.
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools have become essential for cloud security. These solutions automatically identify and remediate risks, misconfigurations and compliance violations across multicloud environments, providing continuous monitoring and threat detection to reduce organizations’ attack surfaces and prevent breaches. Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools, which speed up threat response by connecting disparate security tools, have also emerged as critical solutions. Additionally, federal agencies have been required to adopt a zero-trust architecture that moves them away from perimeter-based defenses in favor of continuous verification of users, devices and data.
INFRASTRUCTURE: According to MeriTalk, half of federal CIOs say infrastructure modernization is a top priority for 2026, up from just one-third the year before. Infrastructure modernization includes networking, storage and compute advancements to support AI, edge computing and high-performance workloads. These capabilities enable agencies to process data closer to the mission and respond to developments in real time. Legacy systems remain a major constraint for many agencies, limiting scalability and slowing innovation.
By contrast, modern infrastructure enables more agile, resilient operations while ensuring networking, storage and compute capacity will not become a bottleneck that limits the adoption of emerging technologies. Ultimately, agencies need to find ways to integrate their on-premises infrastructure with their cloud environments and security solutions in a single cohesive ecosystem. Currently, most agencies lack a centralized view of their overall IT environments, in part due to operational technology systems and other solutions that need to be air gapped. To ensure that modernization efforts achieve their goals, agencies should seek to attain real-time visibility that is as comprehensive as possible.
Click Below To Continue Reading
According to MeriTalk, 70% of federal CIOs say that AI is among their top three priorities for 2026, up from just 33% the year before. Many leaders are finding that change management and implementation are as important as the technology itself.
Start with the problem, not the platform: Leaders are under pressure to adopt AI, which can lead to adoption without a clear plan. Agencies should start by defining the problem they are looking to solve and then implement AI tools that help them achieve that goal.
Fix the foundation first: Successful AI adoption depends on the modernization of existing assets. If data center infrastructure, cybersecurity tools and identity management solutions are dated or cumbersome, agencies will struggle to implement AI at scale.
Recognize that data is the real challenge: AI tools require high-quality data. Fragmented data stores, cybersecurity limitations and unaligned stakeholders can hold AI programs back.
Address workforce concerns: Many employees worry AI tools will eliminate their jobs. Leaders can quell these fears by explaining what problems AI tools will solve and emphasizing that the technology is meant to help free up humans for more strategic work.
Technology modernization succeeds only when it helps improve outcomes for both internal users and the citizens that agencies serve. Human-centered design (HCD) plays a critical role in ensuring that modern IT environments deliver solutions that are meaningful, usable and accessible, and agencies are increasingly adopting HCD principles to align digital services with user needs. By carefully tracking these metrics related to the user experience and the agency’s mission, leaders can improve efficiency, increase IT adoption and enhance public trust.
SECURITY INDICATORS: Cybersecurity investments often succeed or fail based on user behavior, and agencies can look to a number of key data points as proxies for whether these solutions are achieving their intended outcomes. For instance, phishing click rates show whether security awareness training is actually changing behavior, and shadow IT rates reveal whether employees are using unsanctioned applications. Agencies can also track the mean time between a security event and user notification to reveal how quickly people are informed and empowered to respond when an account or system is compromised.
APPLICATION ADOPTION: Employee adoption rates for new applications let agency leaders know whether these solutions are actually solving problems or if they are sitting unused. Low adoption rates may indicate an application does not support existing workflows, integrates poorly with other systems or simply fails to solve the problem it was purchased to address. This is especially important as agencies consolidate systems, modernize applications and deploy collaboration or analytics platforms. If users continue to rely on legacy tools, spreadsheets, or manual workarounds instead of adopting new solutions, agencies may not be realizing the expected value from their investments.
OPERATIONAL COSTS: IT modernization should not only improve performance but also make organizations more efficient. By tracking ongoing costs for elements such as cloud resources, on-premises data retention and software licensing, leaders can determine whether their IT modernization efforts are helping them achieve this goal. If the numbers show that these expenses are going up without providing any new benefit, that may mean modernization efforts are simply shifting complexity and cost to another part of the organization, rather than streamlining and simplifying the agency’s overall IT environment.
HELP DESK INTERACTIONS: By looking at support ticket volume, leaders can check the pulse of their user experience. High numbers of password resets, access requests and provisioning delays may indicate an agency needs to modernize its underlying processes rather than merely deploy new tools. Employee and contractor onboarding time is another useful metric. If it takes weeks to provision a new user with the right tools and data, that likely means identity governance and access management practices are inefficient. Overall, support desk data can reveal bottlenecks and give leaders the information they need to improve the user experience.
CITIZEN OUTCOMES: For IT tools that directly support citizen services, the most important metrics are those tied to specific citizen outcomes. For example, agencies might measure how long it takes citizens using their website and other digital tools to process a claim, resolve a dispute, complete an application or request a benefit. These metrics will vary considerably across different agencies, but they may include processing times, abandonment rates, call-center volume or satisfaction scores. By tying modernization to citizen outcomes, agencies can ensure that technology investments are having an impact on their core missions.
Successful IT modernization requires more than technology. It demands a strategic, phased approach supported by the right expertise and services, with agencies balancing immediate needs with their long-term transformation goals. A trusted partner can help agencies assess their existing environments, chart modernization roadmaps, bridge skills gaps and manage environments over time. Workshops and assessments can help identify opportunities to optimize existing systems, improve efficiency and align IT investments with measurable mission outcomes.
MIGRATE RESOURCES: CDW’s experts can help agencies determine which resources should stay on-premises and which should move to the public cloud, and they can also guide the migration process. Typically, this process will start with a simple lift and shift for workloads that can run effectively in the cloud as is. Next, the migration will focus on more complicated workloads that require refactoring or rewriting.
MODERNIZE APPS: Legacy applications often depend on outdated operating systems, integrate poorly with other tools, and require excessive IT maintenance and support. By modernizing their application environment, agencies can reduce manual work, improve the user experience and prepare apps for AI integration. CDW can help agencies evaluate legacy applications, prioritize the systems with the greatest mission impact and develop modernization strategies that improve performance without disrupting essential services.
STRESS-TEST SECURITY SYSTEMS: As agencies modernize their IT environments, their security tools and practices must keep pace. Agencies are adopting more integrated approaches to security operations, including zero-trust frameworks and extended detection and response (XDR) tools, to improve visibility across increasingly distributed environments. Penetration testing, red team exercises and architecture reviews can help identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
EVALUATE AI READINESS: Successful AI implementation starts with clearly defined use cases and a realistic understanding of current capabilities. AI initiatives often expose underlying challenges, such as siloed data, poor data quality or outdated infrastructure. Rather than encountering these problems for the first time during a failed AI pilot, agencies should conduct readiness assessments to ensure the necessary foundations for AI are in place.
UPDATE INFRASTRUCTURE: IT modernization is an ongoing effort aimed at achieving long-term objectives such as upgrading legacy hardware systems, enhancing network performance, and improving flexibility and scalability across the entire IT environment. A trusted partner such as CDW can offer vendor-agnostic advice, ensuring agencies’ modernization efforts drive them toward specific goals.
ENABLE ADOPTION: Modern technologies can transform agencies only when employees adopt them. Robust training programs and third-party adoption services can help ensure that new tools and processes are used effectively. This is especially important as agencies introduce emerging technologies such as AI. Structured adoption programs can reduce employee resistance and accelerate time to value.
LEVERAGE MANAGED SERVICES: To alleviate talent shortages and keep internal employees focused on strategic projects, many agencies turn to managed and professional services from a trusted partner. Services such as security operations support, infrastructure management and residency programs can help agencies maintain and optimize modern environments without overburdening internal teams. Managed services may also provide access to specialized expertise and 24/7 operational support.
MEASURE SUCCESS: Modernization efforts should be tied to clear, outcome-based metrics. Agencies can track improvements in areas such as system performance, user experience and operational efficiency. Early examples might include reductions in help desk tickets or faster provisioning of users and services. By continuously measuring and refining their approach, agencies can ensure that their modernization investments deliver sustained support for evolving technologies and changes to mission priorities.
- BUILDING THE FOUNDATION
- METRICS FOR MISSION-FOCUSED IT
- MODERNIZATION IN ACTION
A modern IT environment must be built on a flexible, secure and scalable foundation. This begins with cloud adoption, robust cybersecurity tools and modernized infrastructure that supports distributed workloads and data-driven operations. Agency leaders should not treat each of these concerns as stand-alone priorities, but rather leverage the interdependent nature of their cloud, security and infrastructure investments. Together, these foundational components can enable agility, resilience and innovation while also supporting data safety and compliance.
CLOUD: Although the public cloud is now largely a mature technology, agencies continue to experience cloud-related challenges. Data privacy regulations and data sovereignty issues, along with cost concerns, have led organizations across industries to repatriate some workloads to on-premises infrastructure. The rise of AI is accelerating this trend, with organizations recognizing that the most valuable applications of the technology often involve data that cannot live in the public cloud for reasons ranging from security to latency.
Migration is a cornerstone of any cloud strategy, as it enables agencies to quickly reduce reliance on legacy systems while improving scalability and availability. However, leaders must carefully consider whether a simple “lift and shift” migration will help achieve the agency’s goals, or if a more advanced application modernization effort may be needed. To make this determination, leaders must clearly understand their workloads and use cases, as well as how they connect to desired outcomes. Many agencies’ IT resources are now scattered across hybrid cloud and multicloud environments, creating a further need to reduce complexity and improve integration.
SECURITY: Cybersecurity must be a core priority for any modernization effort. In addition to protecting their agencies against traditional cyberthreats, leaders must now also defend against highly targeted ransomware attacks, advanced persistent threats (APTs) and attacks focused on disrupting supply chains and other critical operational functions. While moving to the cloud transfers risk away from on-premises infrastructure, a migration doesn’t automatically eliminate or even reduce vulnerabilities.
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools have become essential for cloud security. These solutions automatically identify and remediate risks, misconfigurations and compliance violations across multicloud environments, providing continuous monitoring and threat detection to reduce organizations’ attack surfaces and prevent breaches. Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools, which speed up threat response by connecting disparate security tools, have also emerged as critical solutions. Additionally, federal agencies have been required to adopt a zero-trust architecture that moves them away from perimeter-based defenses in favor of continuous verification of users, devices and data.
INFRASTRUCTURE: According to MeriTalk, half of federal CIOs say infrastructure modernization is a top priority for 2026, up from just one-third the year before. Infrastructure modernization includes networking, storage and compute advancements to support AI, edge computing and high-performance workloads. These capabilities enable agencies to process data closer to the mission and respond to developments in real time. Legacy systems remain a major constraint for many agencies, limiting scalability and slowing innovation.
By contrast, modern infrastructure enables more agile, resilient operations while ensuring networking, storage and compute capacity will not become a bottleneck that limits the adoption of emerging technologies. Ultimately, agencies need to find ways to integrate their on-premises infrastructure with their cloud environments and security solutions in a single cohesive ecosystem. Currently, most agencies lack a centralized view of their overall IT environments, in part due to operational technology systems and other solutions that need to be air gapped. To ensure that modernization efforts achieve their goals, agencies should seek to attain real-time visibility that is as comprehensive as possible.
Click Below To Continue Reading
According to MeriTalk, 70% of federal CIOs say that AI is among their top three priorities for 2026, up from just 33% the year before. Many leaders are finding that change management and implementation are as important as the technology itself.
Start with the problem, not the platform: Leaders are under pressure to adopt AI, which can lead to adoption without a clear plan. Agencies should start by defining the problem they are looking to solve and then implement AI tools that help them achieve that goal.
Fix the foundation first: Successful AI adoption depends on the modernization of existing assets. If data center infrastructure, cybersecurity tools and identity management solutions are dated or cumbersome, agencies will struggle to implement AI at scale.
Recognize that data is the real challenge: AI tools require high-quality data. Fragmented data stores, cybersecurity limitations and unaligned stakeholders can hold AI programs back.
Address workforce concerns: Many employees worry AI tools will eliminate their jobs. Leaders can quell these fears by explaining what problems AI tools will solve and emphasizing that the technology is meant to help free up humans for more strategic work.
Technology modernization succeeds only when it helps improve outcomes for both internal users and the citizens that agencies serve. Human-centered design (HCD) plays a critical role in ensuring that modern IT environments deliver solutions that are meaningful, usable and accessible, and agencies are increasingly adopting HCD principles to align digital services with user needs. By carefully tracking these metrics related to the user experience and the agency’s mission, leaders can improve efficiency, increase IT adoption and enhance public trust.
SECURITY INDICATORS: Cybersecurity investments often succeed or fail based on user behavior, and agencies can look to a number of key data points as proxies for whether these solutions are achieving their intended outcomes. For instance, phishing click rates show whether security awareness training is actually changing behavior, and shadow IT rates reveal whether employees are using unsanctioned applications. Agencies can also track the mean time between a security event and user notification to reveal how quickly people are informed and empowered to respond when an account or system is compromised.
APPLICATION ADOPTION: Employee adoption rates for new applications let agency leaders know whether these solutions are actually solving problems or if they are sitting unused. Low adoption rates may indicate an application does not support existing workflows, integrates poorly with other systems or simply fails to solve the problem it was purchased to address. This is especially important as agencies consolidate systems, modernize applications and deploy collaboration or analytics platforms. If users continue to rely on legacy tools, spreadsheets, or manual workarounds instead of adopting new solutions, agencies may not be realizing the expected value from their investments.
OPERATIONAL COSTS: IT modernization should not only improve performance but also make organizations more efficient. By tracking ongoing costs for elements such as cloud resources, on-premises data retention and software licensing, leaders can determine whether their IT modernization efforts are helping them achieve this goal. If the numbers show that these expenses are going up without providing any new benefit, that may mean modernization efforts are simply shifting complexity and cost to another part of the organization, rather than streamlining and simplifying the agency’s overall IT environment.
HELP DESK INTERACTIONS: By looking at support ticket volume, leaders can check the pulse of their user experience. High numbers of password resets, access requests and provisioning delays may indicate an agency needs to modernize its underlying processes rather than merely deploy new tools. Employee and contractor onboarding time is another useful metric. If it takes weeks to provision a new user with the right tools and data, that likely means identity governance and access management practices are inefficient. Overall, support desk data can reveal bottlenecks and give leaders the information they need to improve the user experience.
CITIZEN OUTCOMES: For IT tools that directly support citizen services, the most important metrics are those tied to specific citizen outcomes. For example, agencies might measure how long it takes citizens using their website and other digital tools to process a claim, resolve a dispute, complete an application or request a benefit. These metrics will vary considerably across different agencies, but they may include processing times, abandonment rates, call-center volume or satisfaction scores. By tying modernization to citizen outcomes, agencies can ensure that technology investments are having an impact on their core missions.
Successful IT modernization requires more than technology. It demands a strategic, phased approach supported by the right expertise and services, with agencies balancing immediate needs with their long-term transformation goals. A trusted partner can help agencies assess their existing environments, chart modernization roadmaps, bridge skills gaps and manage environments over time. Workshops and assessments can help identify opportunities to optimize existing systems, improve efficiency and align IT investments with measurable mission outcomes.
MIGRATE RESOURCES: CDW’s experts can help agencies determine which resources should stay on-premises and which should move to the public cloud, and they can also guide the migration process. Typically, this process will start with a simple lift and shift for workloads that can run effectively in the cloud as is. Next, the migration will focus on more complicated workloads that require refactoring or rewriting.
MODERNIZE APPS: Legacy applications often depend on outdated operating systems, integrate poorly with other tools, and require excessive IT maintenance and support. By modernizing their application environment, agencies can reduce manual work, improve the user experience and prepare apps for AI integration. CDW can help agencies evaluate legacy applications, prioritize the systems with the greatest mission impact and develop modernization strategies that improve performance without disrupting essential services.
STRESS-TEST SECURITY SYSTEMS: As agencies modernize their IT environments, their security tools and practices must keep pace. Agencies are adopting more integrated approaches to security operations, including zero-trust frameworks and extended detection and response (XDR) tools, to improve visibility across increasingly distributed environments. Penetration testing, red team exercises and architecture reviews can help identify vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
EVALUATE AI READINESS: Successful AI implementation starts with clearly defined use cases and a realistic understanding of current capabilities. AI initiatives often expose underlying challenges, such as siloed data, poor data quality or outdated infrastructure. Rather than encountering these problems for the first time during a failed AI pilot, agencies should conduct readiness assessments to ensure the necessary foundations for AI are in place.
UPDATE INFRASTRUCTURE: IT modernization is an ongoing effort aimed at achieving long-term objectives such as upgrading legacy hardware systems, enhancing network performance, and improving flexibility and scalability across the entire IT environment. A trusted partner such as CDW can offer vendor-agnostic advice, ensuring agencies’ modernization efforts drive them toward specific goals.
ENABLE ADOPTION: Modern technologies can transform agencies only when employees adopt them. Robust training programs and third-party adoption services can help ensure that new tools and processes are used effectively. This is especially important as agencies introduce emerging technologies such as AI. Structured adoption programs can reduce employee resistance and accelerate time to value.
LEVERAGE MANAGED SERVICES: To alleviate talent shortages and keep internal employees focused on strategic projects, many agencies turn to managed and professional services from a trusted partner. Services such as security operations support, infrastructure management and residency programs can help agencies maintain and optimize modern environments without overburdening internal teams. Managed services may also provide access to specialized expertise and 24/7 operational support.
MEASURE SUCCESS: Modernization efforts should be tied to clear, outcome-based metrics. Agencies can track improvements in areas such as system performance, user experience and operational efficiency. Early examples might include reductions in help desk tickets or faster provisioning of users and services. By continuously measuring and refining their approach, agencies can ensure that their modernization investments deliver sustained support for evolving technologies and changes to mission priorities.
CDW can help your agency map its modernization journey and align IT investments to mission priorities.
