A Federal Remote Workforce: Problems and Possibilities

By Gregg Smith, CEO,

Government agency employees have more challenges than most when it comes to working remotely. Even as the pandemic accelerated virtual work arrangements in numerous sectors, government agencies and the military lagged behind. There are many reasons for this:

Each government agency is structured differently. Some have the systems and applications to support telework and some don’t.

Federal agencies are typically secure for unclassified information. Classified information is a different (more challenging) issue.

Many government departments were set up to support very few endpoints outside of their networks. If an entire staff of endpoints exist outside of the network in the form of remote workers, new structures and solutions are required.

Who in the Government Can Work Remotely?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, government agencies had a straightforward process which identified the individuals who could work remotely. This would depend on their job requirements and what level of connectivity they needed to have.
The designation of “ability to work remote” would be applied to a certain percentage of staff based on two scenarios. In the first scenario, those workers would be mobilized due to regular life circumstances. In the second scenario, a different number of workers would be mobilized in the event of an urgent need.
Each agency would be required to have the equipment and capacity to deploy equipment for all identified “possible remote workers.” If the need arose, the selected percentage of workers would work remotely and the rest would go on administrative leave.
The pandemic disrupted these modest projections and was a wake up call to many agencies who found themselves unprepared—both in terms of protocol and equipment—to activate a larger remote workforce.
Planning and Provisioning a Secure Federal Workforce
The reality ma ..

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