Imagine you’re an IT manager at a mid-sized agency, with a small staff and little budget. You’re responsible for not only updating legacy technology, monitoring cloud and data center integration and effecting a strong cyber security posture, but also managing the hundreds of devices given to agency employees.
This is an overwhelming position. Agency IT staff should be focusing on mission-critical technology updates that help deliver the best and most efficient services. Instead, they’re often saddled with simply keeping systems up and running.
The advent of as-a-service offerings has taken some of the pressure off these overworked federal employees, but much of the innovation has focused on software, from infrastructure-as-a-service and network-as-a-service to storage-as-a-service and software-as-a-service, not much has been done to address physical hardware management like the devices so many government workers rely on.
Devices are the lifeblood of the modern mobile workforce. No longer are agency workers chained to their desks by clunky computers. Now, with slim notebooks, tablets and smartphones, they can take on the business of keeping citizens services running from just about anywhere. They can actually go out into the field, do research, meet people and generally be more agile with the way they go about doing their jobs.
This is a huge boon to the federal government and the public. But all of those devices need to be secured, deployed, refreshed and retrieved when an employee leaves the agency. Beyond that, what happens when those devices age and need to be replaced? This is a huge cost for agencies.
These aren’t easy tasks even for the most well-oiled IT department, let alone ones that are helping shepherd the government through its most significant technology transformation in decades.
That’s where device-as-a-service (DaaS) comes in. Relatively news on the “XaaS” scene, DaaS has made significant strides in addressing some of the biggest IT management pain points.
The best DaaS plans are holistic, relieving IT teams of acquiring devices, supporting them and retiring them. This means agencies can quickly and easily scale up or scale down device deployments as the needs of their employees change, and organizations can refresh devices more quickly, upgrade to new technologies more easily without taking on the responsibility for managing and maintaining devices in the first place.
Essentially, you’re transferring device management from IT workers who have disparate responsibilities, to a team that does it each and every day.
DaaS also factors in the need for the best technology as it becomes available, allowing agencies to deploy new devices that meet the demands of the federal workforce when they need them. That service essentially shifts the cost of acquiring new technology from a capital expenditure to an operating expense, saving the government a lot of money.
HP, and our partner Iron Bow, have teamed up to make this kind of complete DaaS offering a reality for federal agencies. HP DaaS is a complete solution that combines hardware, insightful analytics, proactive management, and device lifecycle services. We offer end-to-end lifecycle services for devices that range from designing the initial plan to retrieving old devices during a tech refresh.
Iron Bow plays a huge part in the management process. Their IronCare offering starts with the procurement of devices and encompasses everything from security and asset tagging to inventory and warranty management.
Agency IT teams do incredibly important work. They maintain the systems that keep our country running, delivering services to citizens from Maine to Hawaii, from Florida to Alaska. We’d love to help ease that burden. Let us take this one off your plate.
For more information about DaaS, visit Iron Bow’s website.
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