In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have sped up their digital transformation to the cloud. Likewise, federal, state and local governmental have also been forced to innovate and move toward the cloud at a much faster pace.

Jim Richberg (pictured, left), public sector chief information security officer at Fortinet Inc., and Kenny Holmes (pictured, right), head of public sector go-to-market strategy at Fortinet Worldwide Public Sector GTM, spoke with Justin Warren, guest host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed the impact of COVID-19 on the public sector and the digital transformation within governments. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following has been condensed for clarity.]

This year has been an accelerator for the cloud, in particular for the public sector. What have you see from the federal governments? 

Richberg: [COVID-19] has been a dramatic accelerator to the federal government’s adoption of cloud. Three-quarters of the agencies were already moving in the direction of the cloud and planning to spend roughly $8 billion on it this year — and that was pre-COVID. And the pace certainly picked up.

We had the guidance that came out of DHS … that facilitated abilities to let … remote teleworkers connect directly to the cloud without having to connect back through their APC infrastructure. Then they put out the guidance later this year for Trusted Internet Connection access, which had a use case that was built around … facilitating the ability to say, “You can connect directly to the cloud with security in that direct line stack. You no longer have to haul your data back to the enterprise edge, to the date center on-premise to then go straight out to the cloud. That’s why roughly half of the federal workforce is now working form home, and many of them are using cloud-based applications and services.

How has the local and regional government been doing it? The same as the federal government, or is there something unique to the way they’ve had to adapt?

Holmes: State and local governments are certainly facing the … perfect storm of the rising demand and declining resources. The pandemic has certainly driven a lower tax base and lower revenues. And as a result of that, we’re seeing adjustments in budgets, etc. But we’re also in a position uniquely where it’s also driving digital innovation at the same time. So they’re doing more with less, and they’re using digital transformation to get there.

Richberg: The key differentiator … between the federal and the state and local experience has been the resources. The federal government runs a deficit. We’ve seen the deficit balloon. Federal spending is up 17-20% … so we are using cloud to do more. And as Kenny noted, state governments and local governments, because they’re funded exclusively by taxes, they can’t run a deficit. They have had to say, “We need to spend smarter, because we can’t spend more … and we have to deliver more digital services at the same time.”

The security challenge pretty much is the same everywhere. So what is Fortinet’s role in helping customers make better use of public cloud? 

Richberg: One of the things that Fortinet has brought to this equation is they really are a very broad-based cybersecurity provider. The biggest problem that organizations typically have in the cloud is misconfiguration by the customer. It’s not AWS that’s making the mistake. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s misconfiguration by the customer. So having the ability to say, “If you know how to do your security in an on-premise environment and you’ve got controls, capabilities and settings that you’re comfortable with, you can migrate those intact, if they work for you, into your cloud environment.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Fortinet Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Fortinet nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE