By: Dave Young

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is upon us. Like each previous instance of fundamental change in the world–the steam engine, mass electrification and the silicon chip, the public sector has been both a supporter and a beneficiary of these revolutionary changes.

And now, the 4IR means that the future is built on how we acquire, analyze and act on our data. Lumen is a new brand for a well-established technology company focused on making that future a reality for all our customers.

What does this mean for the public sector?

We often talk about IT modernization. Modernizing the network. Modernizing application delivery. Modernizing IT services. These are important matters and we are proud to help the public sector with all its IT infrastructure needs.

For some time now, however, we’ve been having a much more sophisticated conversation and the Lumen brand explicitly acknowledges that. When we sit down with our public sector colleagues, we are talking about a digital transformation of government services to create value for our citizens in new ways.

Fiber optic networks and cloud migration are certainly components of that conversation, but they are no longer the starting point. The Lumen platform is designed to enable agencies to organize around their missions in the most effective and efficient way possible.

The Acquire, Analyze, Act Architecture

Agency missions are increasingly about acquiring, analyzing and acting on data. That’s true at the local level where school districts are now delivering education remotely and creating “smart cities.” It’s true at the state level where citizens are using a variety of smart devices to interact with government and receive services. It is certainly true at the national level as well – citizens expect to be able to interact digitally with federal agencies ranging from the Social Security Administration to national parks and homeland security .

The Lumen platform is focused on putting the right resources where you need them. Some applications work just fine running out of the cloud, for instance. In fact, the vast majority of cloud data centers already connect to our network. Increasingly, though, the most effective way to manage any operation is not with one technology choice but with a hybrid approach.

Data is acquired at the network edge, often from numerous sources ranging from people to machines outfitted with the Internet of Things (IoT). That data is often sent to the cloud where analytics engines extract a bunch of insights. However, acting on those insights is often not possible in the cloud. In many cases, having a cloud-like capability much closer to the network edge – called edge computing or edge cloud – puts the applications, data collection resources and/or control logic much closer to where these analytic insights can create value.

To drive this action, agencies need an IT architecture that reduces network latency. Milliseconds matter when coordinating emergency response, healthcare services or homeland security concerns. It can also reduce costs. These edge cloud resources can collect the data produced locally and apply  processing so that only the most important data needs to be transmitted across the network to the cloud data center and its expensive analytics engine.

The Lumen platform orchestrates this acquire, analyze, act framework so it can be tailored to a specific mission. We do that through the combination of: adaptive networking, connected security, edge cloud, plus the communication and collaboration tools modern organizations need. With our platform, you can move faster, scale into the future, protect your connections, and collaborate on fulfilling your mission.

Public Sector Future

The Lumen platform allows us to help you think through the mission implementation at a higher level than the underlying infrastructure. Our experts can architect your solution via our platform and we can manage it into the future.

And so, this is how I want to introduce our public sector colleagues to Lumen. A new brand with a long history, but with the same collaborative service you’ve come to expect from the same great people. Let’s chat.

AUTHOR

Dave Young serves as Senior Vice President of Lumen’s Public Sector route to market as well as the company’s global hyperscale cloud business. The Public Sector group encompasses the U.S. federal government, state and local government, military agencies, research and education institutions, and public safety organizations. Dave leads a multifunctional customer-facing organization of more than 1,000 professionals responsible for business development, capture management, sales, solutions architecture and program management. He is accountable for Public Sector’s overall market strategy and profitability.