Chapter 10
Serving in the Public Sector or Academia
Government agencies and educational institutions need experienced networking professionals as much as private industry does. Governments and educational institutions rely as much on information systems as the private industry, and they face the same challenges — primarily, building and managing networks and systems that adequately support key business processes.
Although the principles of networking are similar in any kind of organization, working in government and education is different from work in the private sector. Is it right for you? Only you can decide. In this chapter, you find information to help you make that decision.
Working for a Federal, State, or Local Agency
Agencies at all levels are in need of qualified networking professionals who have many of the same skills sought by the private sector. No matter where you work, your skills and knowledge of networking and information systems can be used to build and manage networks and systems that are vital to the ongoing operation of government agencies at all levels.
Public service
Working in any level of government is frequently referred to as public service. In a public sector job, you serve the public in a professional capacity, providing assistance to your agency in the quest to facilitate more efficient access to information and information systems.
Public service is an honorable career pursuit, but it is often considered a career that includes tradeoffs in the following four ways:
In the public sector, you're somewhat further away from the cutting edge, you will have a somewhat lower salary, but your level of risk and time commitment are lower as well. Is the public sector right for you? Only you can answer that. Let's look at more facts of public service in the rest of this section.
Transparency
Everything that goes on in all levels of the public sector is subject to public examination and scrutiny. The memos you write, the emails you send, and the contracts between your agency and outside companies are available to the public on request, with a few exceptions. (The privacy of citizens and public service employees is protected, and in some cases, sensitive information such as system security configurations are unavailable for reasons that I hope are obvious.)
Some professionals bristle at this level of transparency and consider it an invasion of their professional privacy. However, the rationale behind transparent government is a long-standing one in the United States: It is a protection against tyrannical rule. Transparency is just another aspect of public service that comes with the territory.
The glacial pace of change
Government has a long-standing reputation of making progress slowly. Sure, for the most part, government agencies may not have the latest high-tech gadgetry, but often our government agencies at least have the basics to get the job done. But the sometimes-slow pace of progress is not just about technology.
Government should be thought of as an institution with well-defined and deeply entrenched business practices, which sometimes lag behind the practices in private industry.
Leadership
Another big difference between public sector organizations and the private sector is that leadership changes are sometimes based on elections, rather than on a professional hiring process. Thus, executive leadership can change on a regular basis, and leaders are often chosen more for their political prowess or governing abilities than for their understanding, or even comprehension, of the world of information technology.
This same dynamic can raise challenges for nontechnical private sector organizations, but at least the leaders are usually selected and maintained for their expertise in the business of the enterprise. And in those cases, with the correct information from you and your peers, the private sector executive is more open or interested in understanding the risks presented by the use of technology.
In the public sector, leaders concentrate on their political priorities, so they often have no time or inclination to consider whether their computing and networking infrastructure is effective. Fortunately, department heads, at least in larger public sector organizations, often survive several terms of office. Therein lies the hope and possibility of creating and maintaining networks of lasting value and resilience.
At state and local levels, you'll likely have less exposure to high tech innovations and experience. But as you go into the federal government and defense work level, you're likely to have more exposure to cutting edge technology.
With larger government institutions (especially those that protect information), you can get the benefits of scale. For example, monitoring and reporting of every system on a network may not be cost effective at smaller agencies but is routine at the Department of Defense level.
Tenure
In part, the pace of change in the public sector is a result of people remaining in their government jobs for decades, sometimes in the same job. People resist change, and if the same people stay in their jobs for years or decades, their way of doing things tends to stay the same. These practices lag behind the way things are accomplished in private industry. This practice drives some people a little crazy, but public service is not for everyone.
One reason why people tend to stay in public service jobs is the pension, a long-term benefit that has all but disappeared from the private sector. Whereas public sector pay is lower than the private sector, a public sector pension may be quite generous for those who spent their entire career in public service.
Regulations
Aside from the general theme of transparency described previously, government agencies are also subject to regulations requiring them to enact controls to protect information and information systems. The most noteworthy of these is the Federal Information Systems Management Act (FISMA) of 2002, which requires every U.S. federal agency to establish effective information security programs.
At a minimum, federal agencies are required to enact security programs based on two key documents:
Agencies are required to develop a System Security Plan (SSP) for each information system, and undergo periodic certification and accreditation processes for each system to ensure that it meets applicable security requirements and standards. Networking professionals in government agencies are typically involved in these processes.
Working for a Military or Defense Contractor
U.S. federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, enlist the help of many outside organizations for the development of military and defense capabilities, including weaponry and other support of active military forces. They are also often used to provide staff augmentation to fill in understaffed roles; cyber-related roles are often filled with contractors due to the need for experienced and certified individuals. Although these organizations are considered to be in the private sector, they warrant a separate discussion because there are differences in how they operate.
Depending on the particular firm and its purpose, jobs in military and defense contracting companies can resemble government itself in terms of the rate of change, the longevity of the employees, and the potentially glacial pace of operation. On the other hand, many companies and their positions can be much more like the private sector, with a higher pace of work, more exposure to high-tech innovation, and profit sharing!
Employees in military and defense contractor firms usually undergo onerous background checks at the time of hire. For many people in positions of higher sensitivity, background checks may be periodically conducted throughout their employment.
Defense contractors are a public-private hybrid
By working for a defense contractor, you can get access to some of the benefits of working with large government organizations (and exposure to what they do) without having to work through government bureaucracy, and you get the benefits of working for the private sector (technically). At the same time, although you often get a comparably higher salary, you don't have the job security or necessarily the same hours.
I think government contracting is really in between private and public from a career and benefits perspective. A word of caution: Many of the larger government contracting firms work on a contract-by-contract basis, so while you're an employee of the contractor, after the contract with the government is over, you may not be guaranteed a job.
Brian Haller, Seattle
Going Back to School
Whether you consider working in K through 12 or in higher education, employment in education is public service work (unless you work for a private school).
For the most part, networking in education is a lot like networking in public service: things move slowly, and there may not be a lot of money in the budget to get the tools you think are needed to support the organization. Chances are, you'll be dealing with people deeply entrenched in their careers; many may be resistant to making the kinds of changes you think are warranted to ensure that networks and systems are more resilient and reliable.
Higher education suffers from a paradox in the closely related information security profession: Universities are generally thought of as open environments with little or no controls to restrict what students and faculty are permitted to do on campus networks. This practice sometimes contradicts security professionals' mission of protecting an environment through controls such as a firewall, an intrusion prevention system (IPS), and a data loss prevention (DLP) system. Often, however, this dichotomy plays out through the creation of a highly protected portion of a university's environment housing servers containing sensitive information. This practice of network segmentation, or the creation of various security zones, protects certain systems while relaxing security in other places. And guess who gets to design, implement, and manage that network segmentation? You guessed it: you.