LEADERSHIP VOICES

Sponsored Content:

Amid the numerous challenges wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, a clear saving grace has been the ability and capacity of information technology to keep so much in our lives going. As mass-scale telework became a reality for the public sector, the recent adoption of cloud computing and our ability to easily connect with business systems under all but the most locked-down security settings has not only prevented a wholesale shutdown of government and business but also kept workers productive and collaborative.

While some user communities were caught unprepared for remote operations, the vast majority of government programs continued to operate as workers moved away from central offices and into their own homes. Data remained secure. Operations continued, largely unfettered. Adjustments were made. The world may have slowed down in many respects, but it did not stop — largely because the internet kept us going.

“COVID-19 was certainly an inflection point,” says Carl De Groote, Area Vice President, U.S. Federal for Cisco. “From an evolutionary perspective, we’re seeing the needs of the user community and the government’s embracing of platforms come together at a critical time.”

The Journey to Foundational Cloud

De Groote has spent more than two decades in the computer industry, including 18 years at Cisco, and has seen the landscape shift immensely during that time and overwhelmingly toward cloud-based user-centric platforms. A generation ago, technology was implemented by the enterprise, for the enterprise.

“Today, it’s all about the user,” De Groote emphasizes. Indeed, users have begun to take things into their own hands in order to more effectively deliver the mission.

This dedication to problem solving is far from new. Growing up, De Groote was a huge movie enthusiast and one of his favorites was the 1982 version of Tron. “At the time of its release De Groote had just received my first computer as a gift and become fanatic about all it could do,” he says. With a teacher for a mother and an electrical engineer for a father, he drew from his mother’s creativity and his father’s pragmatism to approach problem-solving and development both back then and today. “In applying this to modern real-world problem sets, there in my opinion, is no problem we can’t solve if we, like the characters in Tron, fight for the user with full imagination and resolve.

The move to cloud platforms, for example, has been crucial to equipping agencies with the flexibility and agility they needed to adapt to the COVID-19 crisis, but adoption wasn’t always a top-down approach. In fact, adoption began as an individual user movement — many moved to “shadow IT” solutions in the commercial cloud to meet changing needs. This shifted over time as agency IT shops caught up with user demand and overcame initial reluctance to trust the cloud.

“The user is always going to invoke mission to get the capabilities needed to do the job,” De Groote says. “So, they went out and started to embrace new platforms, new applications in various clouds, and then the enterprise had to catch up. CIOs have to focus on mission too, but they’re also focused on other things: scale and security, software licensing, and governance.”

It didn’t take IT too long to catch up to need. CIOs quickly came around to the idea that industry was better suited in many ways to manage the scale and complexity of large, scalable platforms. By adopting platforms developed and maintained commercially, and minimizing customization, CIOs could better deliver the support mission owners needed without overwhelming internal IT teams.

“The tipping point comes about because the mission requires a focus on the workforce — giving them the applications they need,” says De Groote, noting that at Cisco, teams work hand-in-hand with government IT leaders and teams to focus on that evolution through a process called the transformational roadmap. “We focus on the mission effects the government wants to roll out or create, the funding, the operating model impact. From there, we focus on answers: What’s the best approach? How do they get faster? How can we leverage automation? We want to serve the needs of the user from a platform-centric perspective, with the developer community in tow, helping to continue to roll out improvements.”

That the COVID-19 transition was comparatively smooth was not an accident, De Groote says. Agencies have taken massive steps toward cloud solutions over the past five to eight years, making it possible for whole branches of government to shift on a dime. Essentially, the pandemic response was less of a big bang and more akin to pulling a lever.

“It’s all designed to really serve the needs of the user; that was the key,” he says. “That’s why defense has gone to Enterprise IT as a Service: to move that complexity over the line, give it to industry, and deliver new capabilities — faster — to the user.”

“The user is always going to invoke mission to get the capabilities needed to do the job. So, they went out and started to embrace new platforms, new applications in various clouds, and then the enterprise had to catch up. CIOs have to focus on mission too, but they’re also focused on other things: scale and security, software licensing, and governance.”

CARL DE GROOTE | Area Vice President, U.S. Federal, Cisco

Platforms are Paramount

That cultural change means IT leaders and mission owners are better positioned to manage change on the fly and to rapidly adjust to a new normal. With the basics in place and a willingness of integration partners to chip in with late night calls and 24/7 support, agencies were ready to take on many of the changes that came with the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I look at organizations and agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, and you see good continuity of operations, well thought-out telemedicine,” says De Groote. But these agencies shouldn’t stop there, they need to keep looking toward the future, seeing how to scale these tools to effectively support more users with a better, more intuitive experience.

Platforms are critical to that scaling process.

“Without platforms, it’s really difficult to deliver capabilities,” De Groote says. “Platforms scale easily. They’re intuitive. They’re designed with the user in mind. They don’t take as much training as legacy systems did in the past. It’s easier to get user buy-in; and consistent delivery of new features are part of the package.”

This is what De Groote means when he talks of shifting complexity to the other side: By adopting commercial platforms rather than custom-developed solutions, risk is reduced, upgrades and maintenance are built into the equation, and if requirements change, an organization’s ability to adjust, recalibrate and continue operating is enhanced.

“The Senate and the House conducted hearings remotely — that’s new,” De Groote says. But that was only possible because basic underlying decisions had already been made. True transformation can only be achieved if you’re willing to depart from traditions for better collaboration and outcomes.

But it’s important to look ahead and continue future-proofing networks and systems. When agencies shift from in-house applications to modern cloud platforms, the change requires a new mindset, De Groote says. Instead of a largely static system with occasional new services, modern platforms are perpetually evolving.

“The best platforms in the world are iterative,” De Groote explains. “Great platforms take advantage of the collective needs of the user base, even for those users with unique requirements. I look at platforms these days as being 90 percent common with 10 percent additional innovation, driven by user needs. You don’t find something and say, ‘Here’s my platform; here’s how it works.’ You need to adapt.”

Cisco’s approach is to introduce the platform, show what it is capable of, and understand the work project.

“Then you can work on extending that capability and build it out,” he says. “We have a rich developer’s network in which thousands of developers come together to hash out issues and discuss solutions. As we solve problems, we make those solutions available to our entire customer base. This is the really cool thing about platforms: You get to access innovation across a community.”

“The best platforms in the world are iterative. You don’t find something and say,
‘Here’s my platform; here’s how it works.’ You need to adapt.”

CARL DE GROOTE | Area Vice President, U.S. Federal, Cisco

Focus on the Data

In order to tap that innovation in a platform-centric world, CIOs must turn their focus to the data.

“Data doesn’t live in only one place. It needs to be accessible and actionable,” De Groote says. To be effective, platforms must be able to access and share data in raw form as well as in mission context. That’s easier said than done.

“Data lives on the edge in a lot of places and across a lot of disparate data silos,” De Groote explains. “That might be in a public cloud or a private cloud, depending on the sensitivity of the data. The question is: How do we make data accessible and actionable?”

Cisco’s Cloud Connect is one solution. The tool looks to make data manageable, connect different clouds securely, and protect data in motion.

“It’s cloud protecting cloud,” De Groote says. “It’s a cohesive strategy to create a seamless environment so we can get to a state we call ‘cloud consume,’ where you understand all the dependencies between your applications and the underlying infrastructure — and you get access to the data where it lives.”

It’s important to note that when it comes to data, no two scenarios are exactly the same, which is why custom solutions and trusted vendor partners are so important. Agencies may have multiple cloud environments, both on site and off, and the intricacy of workflows that orchestrate the movement of data in and out of these clouds in order to use it can be complex.

“At the end of the day, what we’ve really learned is we live in a multi-cloud world,” De Groote says, noting that even within Cisco there are over 400 data sources and clouds the company leverages; agencies are no different. “Driving that visibility and having the ability to move data amongst the clouds is really important.”

“At the end of the day, what we’ve really learned is we live in a multi-cloud world. Driving that visibility and having the ability to move data amongst the clouds is really important.”

CARL DE GROOTE | Area Vice President, U.S. Federal, Cisco

Securing the Network

But just making data actionable and accessible isn’t where considerations end for agencies. In order to effectively serve organizations, data security is a must.

In the early days of the internet, networks could be blind and security experts focused on securing the network. Today, the strategy has shifted. The network may be targeted with an intent to shut it down, but the more common target is the data. That means the network itself can no longer be blind, but rather has to be increasingly intelligent. In movie terms, what Hollywood dreamt up decades ago as Skynet – the fictional artificial neural network that was super intelligent or “self-aware”.

“The network is a ubiquitous mediation point that provides the visibility to easily detect threats and achieve greater insight,” De Groote says. “Real uptime monitoring across a multi cloud environment, understanding dependencies, monitoring performance of applications are the critical functions. From a security perspective, workload protection provides the segmentation between user groups and communities to allow you to protect data and classify qualifications for accessing data.”

Software-defined networks take that one step further, making the network infinitely flexible, as well as agile and intelligent enough to change on the fly.

“The ability to reconfigure and mount a defense against any threat, or shut down malicious attacks, is progressing quickly,” De Groote says. “Automation can identify role-based or behavior-based anomalies. Today, we can certainly respond based on AI and algorithms that are agile enough to recognize threats.”

“The ability to reconfigure and mount a defense against any threat, or shut down malicious attacks, is progressing quickly.”

CARL DE GROOTE | Area Vice President, U.S. Federal, Cisco

A User-Centric Future

In more than two decades in the industry, De Groote has witnessed the incredible evolution of government computing that has taken place over that time from enterprise-focused to user-focused. Today, me must fight for the user as vigorously as Tron did back in 1982.

“The user experience should be at the center of everything we do and develop. It’s simplifying everything; not only the interface, but really the architecture,” he adds. “In this data-centric, user-centric world, where we’re connecting to multiple clouds over the internet, optimizing applications’ performance to ensure the best user experience, we’re also facing risks. We’re opening up the attack surface, so we have to defend against a greater number of cyber exploits. As users rise in prominence, seeking to access data from any device at anytime from anywhere, the enterprise has to adapt.”

In effect, making it all about the user means platforms must be all about securing the data for those users — while ensuring no one else can access it.

“Fundamental to our strategy beginning years ago, Cisco has driven to software platforms,” De Groote says. “Our secure-at-cloud-scale architecture is built to seamlessly connect any user to any application in any cloud. That’s the simplicity of it. The full security stack is built in. That means we can provide the right security at the right place and the right price.”

Indeed, he says, Cisco’s own users report they can now deploy office productivity applications five times faster thanks to that underlying software-defined architecture, while costs are typically 48 percent lower and downtime is reduced by 94 percent.

“In the end, we’re catching up with Hollywood’s vision of what platforms would become. The more intelligent and faster it becomes, the easier it actually is to deploy these platforms into the enterprise and bring it all together,” De Groote says. “It’s smarter from the edge to the core, because it mediates and sees it all.”

Click here to learn more about how Cisco’s FedRAMP Authorized
solutions can help your agency accelerate your modernization initiatives today.