The American Rescue Plan (ARP) is a funding package that was rolled out in early 2021 to help the economy recover from the pandemic. While the plan is extensive and includes over $1.9 trillion in funding, there is over $500 billion in ARP funding available to state, territorial, local, and tribal governments and educational (SLED) organizations.
Funding is intended to help government organizations make long-term investments to promote recovery and prosperity. But many organizations don’t know how to best use the funding, wanting to make the right decision to create meaningful and sustainable change.
Investing in government IT solutions is a great option for SLED organizations to use ARP funding. There are a variety of cost-effective IT services for government and educational organizations. We will help break down how allocated ARP funding can be used on IT to build a solid digital foundation for the future. Here are six government IT solutions your organization should consider.
1. Managed Endpoints
Government agencies need to be on alert with the increased potential of cyberattacks. Investing in securing your endpoints can help protect your infrastructure and data. Endpoints such as servers, workstations, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and IoT devices are potential entry points for malicious cyberattacks. A government IT solution like Managed Endpoint Security can help protect your devices with 24/7 monitoring, alerting, and mitigation of threats.
2. Managed Firewall
A firewall uses predetermined security rules to monitor traffic in and out of your network. Next-generation firewall technology can boost your security at the network level includes unified threat management (UTM), antivirus software, intrusion detection and prevention, deep packet inspection (DPI) of secure sockets layer (SSL) traffic, and the safelisting and blacklisting of websites. When paired with managed IT services for governments, you can rest assured that it’s set up correctly and stays up to date to keep your agency secure.
3. Backup & Disaster Recovery
Even with safeguards in place, a hacker may get into your system and corrupt or steal critical and confidential data. If faced with a ransomware attack, governments need to have a backup in place, that’s managed consistently, so that you can roll back the affected systems to before the attack occurred. Backup and disaster recovery solutions can restore your data with minimal downtime.
4. Managed SD-WAN
SD-WAN is a great government IT solution that can help maximize bandwidth resources at headquarters, branch offices, or cloud sites using various connection types. The technology provides real-time control and visibility over network and application performance, prioritizing critical business applications. It also offers redundant and diverse links for failover or dynamic routing to reduce downtime.
5. MPLS Private Network
Governments should also consider Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), which is a tried-and-true technology for securely connecting branch locations to the data center in a private network environment. This infrastructure is typically managed by a third-party MSP that can guarantee performance, reliability, and quality of transmission.
6. Managed Wi-Fi 6
Wireless networks need to handle more devices and higher throughput requirements as well as issues associated with radio interference and security. Wi-Fi 6 wireless access points use multigigabit technology to achieve speeds up to four times faster than previous Wi-Fi standards, resulting in greater user capacity, broader coverage, and more.
Which Government IT Solution Is Best?
TPx has the resources and professional expertise to help governmental organizations decide which technologies would be most impactful to their organization. For more information about ARP, read our Government IT Solutions ARP Funding Guide.