4 Tech Trends to Watch in State and Local Government in 2022

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has continued to influence how agencies use technology and how citizens interacted with the government in 2021. State and local governments responded in various ways.

Fremont, CA: Zero-trust cybersecurity increased adoption of identity and access management technologies, cloud migration, and application modernization are the big four. Here's a quick rundown of each of these themes, along with links to more in-depth articles.

1. The Future of Cybersecurity Is Zero-Trust

Although the White House has demanded that federal agencies adopt the framework, zero-trust is still a relatively new concept in state and local governments. However, this is beginning to change.

"We can expect more states to take a zero-trust approach to cybersecurity," says Eric Sweden, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers' enterprise architecture and governance program manager. According to the 2021 Annual State CIO Survey, 67 percent of state CIOs believe that implementing or expanding a zero-trust framework will gain greater attention in the next two to three years.

2. States are Looking to Increase IAM use to Gain Access to Government Services.

This year's NASCIO conference was all about it: every state looked eager to deploy an identity and access management scheme.

Some states, like Ohio, are well on their way to establishing a single digital identity that citizens can use to access various government services. Others are just starting. However, it appears that this is the path that many people are taking.

3. Economic Factors will Influence Cloud Migration.

In 2022, state and municipal governments will keep migrating legacy IT systems and applications to the cloud. However, this work will most likely be more organized and thoughtful compared to the private sector. Following the increasing movement of apps like email and geographic information systems to the cloud, Alan Shark, executive director of CompTIA's Public Technology Institute, predicts that future migrations will be more fragmented, especially local governments.

4. Government Agencies will Push App Modernization Forward.

The epidemic highlighted that many mission-critical applications are running on antiquated infrastructures or in ancient programming languages that are difficult to update or scale up, emphasizing the necessity for new, digital government services.

"I believe there has been a wake-up call that there were people that were ahead of the curve, and they had a very simple pivot to boost digital service," Shark says. "Others were caught off guard by deteriorating infrastructure."