Innovation in Government

This content is provided by Carahsoft. “Assume your network is compromised” – how can you protect your data? Edward Snowden was a wake-up call that resounded throughout the entire public sector. Government agencies, stewards of…

Juliana Vida, the chief technical advisor public sector for Splunk, said there is hope and there is opportunity, both of which can be found in the data.

The ultimate objective is to eliminate the need to work on multiple devices. Using the cloud, the data is all in one place and easier to access, and easier to share.

Traditional development processes like waterfall just don’t cut it anymore. That’s why Lockheed Martin reached out to Red Hat for help updating the processes and culture around application development for the F-22 Raptor fighter jet.

Chris Townsend, the vice president of federal at Symantec, said with all of these cybersecurity initiatives and expectations agencies must ensure they are on the right path in moving to zero trust, while also addressing challenges around mobility and cloud.

Craig Harber, the chief technology officer for Fidelis Cybersecurity, said there are several steps agencies can take to reduce their risks, starting by consolidating their security tools and architectures.

FireEye has an internal-facing insider threat program, where they fine-tune techniques for preventing insider threat breaches.

Dennis Reilly, the vice president of federal at Gigamon, said tools like next generation network packet brokers help agencies catch up and get ahead of cyber attackers.

Eva Skidmore, the vice president of public sector for Salesforce, said agencies need to continue to improve customer service and IT modernization together by adopting open platforms and application programming interfaces (APIs).

Joel Jackson, the director of emerging technology for Red Hat’s North America Public Sector group, said all of these approaches bring together the key building blocks of modern software design–cloud, automation and microservices–and underpin federal IT modernization efforts.

Rick Howard, the chief security officer for Palo Alto Networks, said the wide-spread acceptance of using cloud services for operational requirements is driving opportunity to modernize.

Working with UiPath, NASA set up four bots that automatically begin processing grant applications for the employees.

Since its inception in 2013, the federal government’s Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation program (CDM), led by the Department of Homeland Security, has helped agencies discover up to 50 percent more assets inside their systems than they were previously aware of. And they’re able to do it in real time.

The TAA system, part of Symantec’s Advanced Threat Protection product, cuts hours of human analysis out of the process through automation and machine learning.