State and local government agencies should map their IT systems and identify critical services before an outage to avoid wasting valuable recovery time, according to Matt Sweet, assistant IT director for the City of Roseville, Calif.
Speaking during a Nov. 2 FedInsider webinar, Sweet emphasized that agencies need a complete picture of their technology environments – including how infrastructure, applications, and services depend on one another – to determine what needs to be restored and in what order.
“Fundamental to being able to operate on a day-to-day basis, let alone when an issue arises, is really understanding your entire asset inventory, your configuration management,” Sweet said.
Roseville, like many municipalities, operates a hybrid IT environment that includes its own data center and cloud services. Sweet said mapping dependencies across those systems helps IT teams identify the impact of a failure and prioritize recovery efforts.
“If you don’t know what you need to fix, you’re going to waste some of that critical time trying to determine exactly where within this chain you need to repair it,” he said.
Sweet also urged agencies to establish restoration priorities before disruptions occur, with stakeholders agreeing on which applications and services are most critical to government operations.
He stressed the importance of executive involvement in those decisions, warning that recovery efforts can become more difficult when every department considers its own applications the highest priority.
For agencies without a complete asset inventory or dependency map, Sweet recommended starting with a small number of critical applications rather than attempting to map every system at once.
“Start with just a handful of them. Get those mapped end to end, and then you can build on,” Sweet said.
He also emphasized that dependency mapping requires ongoing attention as technology environments evolve. Agencies should regularly review and update asset inventories and system dependencies rather than treating the effort as a one-time project.
Ultimately, Sweet said, the goal is to minimize disruptions to government operations so residents and employees can continue accessing services as seamlessly as possible when systems fail.
