Plan forward: Establish a future-agile framework

States today must navigate an ever-evolving array of macro trends, both internally and within the broader technological and economic environment. Consider:

• A growing and aging population boosts the demand for state services, while simultaneously diminishing the supply of skilled technical resources.
• The rising number and severity of weather events threatens states’ ability to keep digital services up and running.
• Worldwide, risks of cybersecurity attacks, continue to rise.

To help states achieve their short- and long-term goals in light of these broad trends, Verizon offers three recommendations. Beyond trying to merely “mitigate” impact, each of these recommendations is designed to provide a path and a vision toward enhancing leadership and innovation:

• Establish a future-agile framework that provides a state-wide, standardized solution and empowers agency-level customization.
• Offer a more secure productivity environment for state professionals.
• Migrate to a hybrid multi-cloud solution. Our goal is to help states create a network environment that supports flexible connectivity between cloud environments, improves network security, and leverages the latest technologies and automation capabilities— while also serving as a platform for future growth.

Recommendation 1: Establish a future-agile framework

Like most large institutions, states face an inherent tension between the efficiency of standardization and the need for flexible, customized solutions.

To balance these competing goals, we recommend implementing a standardized, hybrid cloud-based network system at the state level. A single-provider backbone for all agencies that consume networking resources establishes a unified framework for state network operations.

Such a top-level standard framework can still allow different levels of customization by various agencies and groups. Under a cloud computing model, states can offer noncustom network solutions where required and also establish an environment that supports agency-level application customization where appropriate.

This approach creates a future-agile framework that facilitates technology migrations as well as agency customization requirements. Deploying solutions today that provide the agility to accommodate future changes is critical. To take advantage of new technologies, institutions need solutions that can accommodate change quickly, efficiently and inexpensively.

To establish this future-agile framework, we recommend creating a governance model able to determine which elements must be standardized across the state’s enterprise and which applications can be customized to better align with specific requirements. This model would enable better support of downstream applications and their use cases, while maximizing individual agencies’ ability to customize their solutions.

Further, we recommend achieving this balance of standardization with customization by procuring a single provider for the network backbone and multiple vendors for edge services that tie into the unified network backbone. Benefits of this dual approach include improved scalability, reliability, visibility, manageability, security, costeffectiveness and resiliency.

Recommendation 2: Secure the productivity environment

To counter rapidly increasing security threats and breaches, we recommend that states adopt security technologies and services that offer not only new levels of protection, but also additional benefits and capabilities. When paired with the hybrid multi-cloud solution proposed in Recommendation 3 below, these security technologies can improve visibility into security threats and network status, provide better and more actionable information about solution tools and how personnel are using them, and enable more flexibility to quickly and easily upgrade security infrastructure as new services become available.

Key actions that states can take to improve their security posture include:

• Implement a cloud access security broker (CASB) to act as a gatekeeper of internet traffic between onpremises infrastructure and cloud providers.
• Build and deploy a secure access service edge (SASE) environment to provide security to the edges of the network.
• Deploy an extended detection and response (XDR) solution for visibility beyond end points.
• Implement network visualization to deliver 24/7 visibility into network assets.
• Further bolster security through secure hybrid network components.

Recommendation 3: Migrate to a hybrid multi-cloud solution

A hybrid multi-cloud solution leverages on-premises datacenter, private cloud and public cloud assets into a single, unified platform. It allows the flexible movement of connectivity between cloud environments at will (“any cloud, any time”). States can connect to, and switch between, cloud resources more quickly and easily than was previously possible. Additionally, a hybrid multicloud solution can be implemented in a structured “crawl, walk, run” model that permits forward movement at the pace that matches the state’s needs.

A hybrid multi-cloud approach offers many advantages over traditional, dedicated data center solutions. Note that our overall hybrid multi-cloud architecture supports a FISMA high-connectivity framework.

The infrastructure needed to implement a hybrid cloud solution is best procured with a network-as-aservice (NaaS) framework. NaaS supports continual modernization under an “as-a-service” model, without requiring that states constantly rip and replace equipment as technologies become obsolete. Instead, NaaS establishes future-agile telecommunications services and allows them to more quickly respond to changing needs and technologies.

One key element of a NaaS solution is secure hybrid networking, which simplifies operations and improves flexibility by providing adaptive public and private connectivity through a single hybrid port. Aggregating public and private connectivity through a single port provides a seamless and secure, transport-agnostic experience. Scalable, on-demand tools and services enable decisions and actions in real time. Predetermined routing with peered broadband and cloud providers ensure that first- and last-mile access links have low latency and consistent performance.

A combined NaaS and hybrid muti-cloud solution can empower states to standardize critical network elements across the enterprise. Moving to a hybrid cloud solution provides flexibility for agency customization, and:

• Cost-effective application migration and management
• Enhanced security posture
• Improved resilience and reliability
• Cloud portability for workload mobility
• Future-state AI deployment capabilities

To further enhance networking flexibility and allow experimentation with various networking configurations without risk, we recommend implementing a digital virtual environment. A digital twin or digital virtual environment:

• Enables the creation of a “perfect office” in a virtual “twin” environment to treat fixes and changes to the network.
• Permits a state to change, evaluate and implement functions without risking negative impacts on production.
• Allows a state to model network issues and outages, such as the impact of a disaster on the network, or the impact of a router upgrade, router change or other configuration.

Conclusion

Verizon wants to help states build and manage successful networks of the future. To achieve this, we recommend striking the right balance between services that are costeffective, deliver value and do not become stale over time.

We believe the best way to achieve this is to adopt a framework that defines a set of core standards with a single backbone network, while also allowing for tailoring of solution elements and policies outside the core.