Page 7 - FCW, January/February 2021

GameChanger
IT Modernization
Data is security
Data exchange allows systems to communicate securely
The coronavirus crisis laid bare the unbreakable relationship between data and information technology modernization. With guidance from the 2019 Federal Data Strategy, which emphasizes sharing managing and protecting data, agencies were able to quickly respond to the evolving public- health crisis.
Sinha said. “What used to be data just for backup and recovery is now intersecting with security. How do you deliver data security in case of security attacks and threats, how do you deliver data to restart your application and recover from the cyber disaster? The intersection of data and security is where Rubrik sits.”
“What used
to be data just for backup and recovery is now intersecting with security.”
“The data strategy is a great way to shim and unstick the cart in terms of digital transformation,” said Bill Gurling, technical product manager at Rubrik.
Consider Operation Warp Speed, the government’s effort to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution, said Jeff Phelan, chief technology officer for public sector
at Rubrik, a company that provides intelligent data management solutions.
The first step toward digital transformation is paying off the technical debt agencies have in legacy systems. The data strategy, which calls for harnessing existing data and anticipating future uses, can help agencies make data available, exchangeable, portable, standardized and understandable.
“You’ve got members of the military health, civilian health, research and [Defense Department] logistics all working together,” Phelan said. “I guarantee all those systems weren’t designed to talk to each other originally. As they’ve all modernized their infrastructure, there’s a natural progression toward using application interfaces and common formats so you can communicate data and talk between systems.”
BIPUL SINHA
CEO OF RUBRIK
4 areas of transformation
• Data modernization: moving datasets out of legacy systems and into a modern framework where they are accessible and consumable across boundaries – for example, going from an AIX system to a cloud platform.
• Data management: managing disparate datasets in a central platform, such as a hybrid cloud, which can help agencies manage legacy and modern applications across data centers and cloud.
• Cloud automation: the integration of AI and machine learning into workflows and toolsets.
• Data protection: protecting data wherever it resides and in transit – and using solutions that automatically alert security teams when data traverses a boundary it shouldn’t.
• 50% Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings • 8x Faster Backup Performance
• Reduced Daily Backup Management from 3-4 hours to 10 minutes
• 15x Data Reduction
• Rapid recovery to avoid data loss
• 32 Business days of productivity returned from automated SLA engine action
The reason they can communicate is data. The data that each agency manages makes the workflows across them meaningful, said Bipul Sinha, Rubrik’s Chief Executive Officer.
“You need data exchange to be able to achieve all of this, and the security
of the data and the availability of the data, it impacts the availability of the applications,” Sinha said. “Without the data strategy and a framework of data usage and governance and ethical use of data, none of these applications would have any value.”
Still, the pandemic was not a panacea for all digital transformation woes. Instead, it was an accelerant of modernization efforts already under way – and data is at the heart of all of them.
“Data security is now the top of mind,”