Jamie Bennet
Government agencies should adopt site reliability engineering principles to improve their internal and customer-facing information technology systems, Netimpact Strategies CEO PV Puvvada wrote in a Nextgov opinion piece published Wednesday.
Puvvada, a six-time Wash100 awardee, said SRE has been tried and tested in the private sector, including big tech companies, and could reduce costs usually spent on operations and maintenance after IT systems are deployed.
He observed federal agencies spend a significant amount of their annual budget on IT O&M despite efforts to modernize their digital services and suggested SRE integration into tech operations for government organizations as one way to preempt potential problems and “toil” after a digital platform deployment.
SREs work to help developers automate upgrades, backups and other management tasks, which Puvvada believes are useful practices in capacity planning, change management, monitoring and emergency response.
Applying SRE approach throughout the growth of systems will forgo the need for linear expansion of operational teams, the NetImpact chief executive noted.
“To successfully implement SRE practices, government agencies must prioritize cultivating a culture of reliability, investing in training and skill development, collaborating with industry experts, incorporating in the concept of operations and making it a requirement in procurements.”
