The Three Pillars of an Effective Data Strategy for Government Agencies

Government agencies rely on hundreds of systems of record, most of which must routinely interact with growing stores of data in various repositories, both on site and in the cloud. Despite these challenges, agencies must be able to remain efficient, citizen-centric and mission-ready.

So how can agencies find, access and unlock the data they need to support the mission without compromising security? The key is enabling enterprise data integration, using APIs as standard building blocks. With this approach, agencies will run more efficiently, innovate independently without having to change the entire call stack with each new release of the underlying system of record, and generally drive reuse across disparate sets of groups and individuals, all while enforcing zero trust access.

Getting to this point requires achieving three pillars:

Pillar One: Declarative connectivity to all data sources

Without connectivity to all data sources, agencies can’t get much done. That’s why evaluating any platform should include understanding what type of connectors are provided. If these connectors are reusable, enabling APIs to connect multiple systems and applications, even better. Evaluating connectivity also should involve examining how dependencies are managed, along with the ability to expose data sources. That continuum of capabilities gets to the heart of connectivity.

Pillar Two: The ability to orchestrate data over multiple channels

It’s critical to be able to support multi-channel access to data under different contexts without having to duplicate the business logic. And because data flows in all directions, your data service platform also should be able to support real-time as well as event-based and batch-oriented flows. It should also embrace data virtualization—being able to separate where data is housed from how it is visualized or used, change the location of the network topology for a service without having to update any of the underlying clients accessing that data. The platform also should be able to keep multiple systems of record in sync and orchestrate events across systems of record.

Pillar 3: Security controls that enable zero trust

The ability to demonstrate full control of data in flight, standardize encryption, provide role-based access and single sign-on, and comply with applicable security requirements are all critical to achieving and maintaining zero trust.

Watch this 20-minute webinar to learn more on securing enterprise data integration through API building blocks.