When the calendars rolled over from 2020 to 2021, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief, anxious that a new year would spell the end of many of the large problems plaguing our country. Unfortunately, things didn’t really turn out that way.
The COVID-19 pandemic that upended life as we know it didn’t magically end when we threw away our old calendars and unwrapped our new ones. Much of the political and social problems that plagued our country also persisted, as if they were unaware that the changing of a single digit in the date was supposed to bring them all to an immediate end.
But, despite these problems and challenges, 2021 saw its share of positive things, especially when it came to the way our government operates and utilizes technology.
For example:
- The shift towards work from home that was essential as a result of COVID drove incredible digital transformation across government agencies at the state, municipal, and federal level as agencies scrambled to implement the systems and applications necessary to operate in a more digital and socially-distant world.
- That digital transformation also resulted in an increase in cyber risk for many agencies, but – despite a long list of notable breaches and disclosed vulnerabilities – agencies began to embrace new approaches to cybersecurity, like Zero Trust, that will help to make government data and networks more secure into the future.
- To facilitate their transformation and modernization initiatives, government agencies embraced new approaches to application development, like DevSecOps, that could help their application development teams more quickly develop and deploy software, while also making government applications more secure.
- Agencies continued to see the value of data; working to generate data about all of their assets – including their buildings and critical infrastructure projects – and finding ways to utilize data generated in their design and construction to manage them more effectively in the future.
The challenges of 2021 created new requirements that innovative government employees and their private sector partners worked quickly to meet. Using exciting new technologies, they rode to the challenges of the past few years, and – in doing so – built pathways and systems that will enable the government to continue to optimize its operations and improve how it services citizens for years to come.
We’ve been honored to cover these and other exciting government IT trends on the GovHub family of publications in 2021. And we look forward to writing about how application development, cyber security, digital design, cloud, and other innovative technologies are shaping the government in 2022 and beyond.
The GovCybersecurityHub will be back with even more content in 2022. We would like to thank you for visiting us in 2021, and encourage you to come back in the New Year to see what we’ve got in store.
Have a safe and happy holiday season,
The GovCybersecurityHub Editorial Team
