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cloud,” one said. “But when it comes time for the accreditation, we’ve seen that around the department, they don’t fully understand, and they’re trying to fit the old rule set into the new technol- ogy. It doesn’t fit.”
A continuously monitored authority to operate (ATO) is “the north star,” another official said. “That’s what everybody wants, but to get there, just look at the way we describe the state right now. Yes, we want to approach it as an ecosystem. No, we don’t want to sacrifice the user experience or cus- tomer experience. Yes, we want to be 100% secure. All these things kind of contradict each other, but you want to get to that nirvana.”
The problem is not cloud systems per se, another official said. “When- ever I hear about continuous ATO and people lamenting the accreditation pro- cess, I still feel like people aren’t focus- ing where the focus needs to be, which is the way we’ve organized ourselves. We don’t incentivize our program offi- cers to change requirements on the fly. And we talk about bringing security on early and often, but do you have the teams with the skill sets that actually have the time to be part of your pro- cess early and often? As you iterate capabilities, do they have the time or even the context to support you? And the answer for most is no.”
In other words, that official said: “We haven’t organized ourselves around how we actually want to func- tion as an organization by continuously building, continuously monitoring and continuously enhancing our software capabilities. I still feel like that’s the major limiting factor for most organi- zations in this domain.”
COVID as catalyst for
leadership buy-in?
The pandemic pushed daily opera- tions into the cloud like never before,
and agency leaders have taken notice, participants said. One described meet-
ing “every two weeks with every single three-star and a few four-stars to talk about our digital modernization strate- gies and how we’re moving forward. It started about three months prior to COVID kicking off, but COVID was almost like gasoline on that fire of top cover for senior leaders — or at the very least creating room for the discussion.”
Another official pointed to the ulti- mate indicator of leaders’ interest. They wanted to know: “Where did we spend our money?” The funds dis- tributed under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act were “about increasing the capacity of compute or about the security. We were already good at security. But I think now we are more into baked-in security.”
“Sometimes you get those moments where the light bulbs go off and they create room for actually solving the problem,” said another official, whose agency had made clear “that we will actively reprioritize fiscal 2022 fund- ing in order to align with our digital modernization and data and cloud modernization initiatives. All options are on the table.”
“There’s an opportunity for us to correct a lot of the technical debt that we’ve incurred over a number of years,” another executive said, “because people in positions of lead- ership are now realizing that our digital infrastructure is a major limiting factor for us to be able to move forward.”
Getting the culture changes to stick
Although top-level support for con- tinued cloud modernization is fairly widespread, the group voiced con- cerns about their agencies reverting to old habits.
“I’m starting to see examples of us falling back into our old ways of doing business,” one said. When it comes to enterprise with a capital E, “people are starting to say, ‘Oh, let’s lock all these
things down’ — meaning it has to be government owned. Everything has to be on the government network.”
That participant added that “one of the things we’re going to learn kind of dramatically this year is that if we don’t design based on the user and make a positive, enjoyable and awesome cus- tomer experience, people are just going to do their own thing anyway, which creates more risk for us.” n
Participants
Les Benito
Director of Operations, Cloud Computing Program Office, Department of Defense
Simone Gills
Customer Engagement Manager, NationalTechnical Information Service
Chuck Grindle
Leader, SLG AWS Digital Government, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services
Allison McCall
Acting CIO, NationalTechnical Information Service
Dovarius Peoples
CIO/G-6, Army Corps of Engineers
Paul Puckett III
Chief, Enterprise Cloud Management Office, Department of the Army
Sagar Samant
Associate CIO for Acquisition IT Services, General Services Administration
James Yeager
Vice President, Public Sector, CrowdStrike
Note: FCW Editor-in-ChiefTroy
K. Schneider led the roundtable discussion.The June 8 gathering was underwritten by CrowdStrike and Amazon Web Services, but both the substance of the discussion
and the recap on these pages are strictly editorial products. Neither the sponsors nor any of the roundtable participants had input beyond their June 8 comments.
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