Government Zoomtopia

Why Zoom is the platform for today’s government

Our Zoomtopia sessions provided an overview of how agencies can apply our technology to address their needs, serve the public, and more.
5 min read

Updated on March 16, 2023

Published on November 15, 2022

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Your mission isn’t what it used to be, so your communications shouldn’t be either. Modern agency operations now require flexible and secure technology, with solutions that elevate public services, emergency responses, and more. 

We know the pace of today’s demands can outstrip existing technology capabilities — that’s why we’ve evolved and scaled both Zoom and Zoom for Government to address the needs of modern-day government.

Our Zoomtopia sessions provided an overview of how agencies can apply our technology to address their needs, serve the public, enhance services, and more. Let’s take a look at the results.

A clear vision ahead

Collaboration technology isn’t there to just keep the lights on anymore, Matt Mandrgoc, Zoom's head of U.S. public sector, reflected during the government keynote. What started as a solution for continuity during the pandemic has contributed to what is now a fundamental shift in how people work, making an intuitive, scalable, and secure communications platform a new mandate for agencies. 

Public sector organizations need to adapt their work environment to the current needs of both their workforce and the public, while still adhering to relevant standards and providing adequate security controls. Zoom for Government does that, and then some. 

Here are just a few recent examples of how we support your modern mission:

  • Zoom for Government has attained relevant authorizations, attestations, and certifications, including FedRAMP, IL4, StateRAMP, and CJIS. The entire list can be found here.
  • Zoom Phone’s flexibility and reliability enable workforce agility. 
  • Our security controls continue to expand, including the recent release of end-to-end encryption for Zoom Phone.
  • We address physical safety requirements through features such as nomadic E-911, which can help with addressing Ray Baum’s Act.
  • We want government communications to be available for everyone, and have built accessibility features such as spotlight and multi-pinning or auto-generated captions.

And many more.

While Matt spoke to current initiatives, our own Lance Ford, specialist sales strategy lead, hopped on the keynote to put some use cases into practice via hardware. From smart conference rooms to digital signage to using Zoom Phone appliance for E-911 and compliance with Ray Baum’s Act, he demonstrated how Zoom-enabled devices can play a seamless and integral role in creating a visual snapshot of what’s going on in your government workplace.

Rob Lloyd, deputy city manager, was able to join us again for our keynote and provided an update on where the City of San Jose is at in its efforts to operationalize a digital workforce and public. “Now, we have to create culture in new ways — we don’t have the hallway setting anymore, so we have to find new ways to build bonds,” Rob noted. To create that culture, Rob said his team is using Zoom to identify avenues for brainstorming, asynchronous collaboration, connection-building, and more.

The makings of a modern federal workplace

For our federal government spotlight session, Lou Giglio, Head of Federal Government Sales, met with David Janney, Director of Unified Communications and Program Director at General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), a defense contracting company that supports the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in nearly a thousand locations across the country. 

GDIT uses Zoom for Government for its own internal operations, as well as part of its services to the FAA. As an integrator for FAA, GDIT first began supporting the federal agency through the implementation of Zoom Rooms. 

Once FAA employees saw how Zoom Rooms let them join a call on any device, anywhere, at any time, adoption for additional solutions came naturally. As David noted, “[For Zoom Rooms implementation] we use DTEN devices and then layer on FAA-specific security protocols for deployment. We then used that to weave Zoom into more of their [infrastructure], and now Zoom is on every desktop, we're growing the amount of Zoom Rooms, and these conference rooms also have Zoom Phone in them.”

Spotlighting a successful “courts as a service” approach

I wanted to kick off my session by relaying how exactly our platform has become a conduit for countless use cases across state and local government. A few key examples? City council meetings, town halls, emergency response, courtroom settings, and much more, with one of our judicial customers joining the “State and Local Spotlight” session to show what that looks like in practice.

Florida’s Office of the State Courts Administrator (OSCA) joined the session, with Roosevelt Sawyer Jr., chief information officer, and Hetal Patel, OSCA information systems manager, speaking about their experience deploying and leveraging our platform in judicial proceedings across the state. Before the pandemic, Hetal brought Zoom to Roosevelt and asked for a few licenses because he found the platform easy to use. Soon enough, those few licenses turned into dozens more with the onset of COVID-19.

Fast forward to the present day and Zoom is used across Florida courts, so much so that the OSCA team has developed what they call “courts as a service.” This approach is focused on maximizing communications technology to best serve the public and increase access to justice, with some proceedings maintaining a virtual component so as to reduce travel time and costs for citizens.

A roadmap to guide your way 

When paving the way for the future of government, it helps to have a map. David Aderonpe, Derek Tam, and David DeLorimier, government product managers, provided that roadmap, chatting through the latest platform updates and revealing what’s to come specifically to the Zoom for Government platform. 

In the rearview mirror

The road ahead 

Become the organization you want to be

As Matt noted in his keynote, the Zoom for Government platform can be associated with the idea of freedom. It gives you the freedom to connect as you see fit — to hire who you want, work where suits you best, and transcend language barriers. Through our platform’s untethered scalability and reliable security, you have the tools to support your organization’s ever-evolving needs. 

Start becoming that workplace now by watching the government-specific Zoomtopia 2022 sessions in our on-demand library.

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Autodesk
Dropbox

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