We’re talking to operational units, and they want what we have as well. It’s a great time to be here working on this – I can only emphasize that where we're going is going to be a fantastic place in a few years. – Ken Lorentzen, Army PEO-C3T

"Our warfighters will utilize this software a lot differently than our business and financial users. We have tiers of services … so agencies don't have to purchase one specific set of licenses for all their users," – Caroline Bean, DISA

“Start at T minus 60 days out. You start letting folks know it's coming ... And there's a series of graduated, information, graduated packets of information to get them used to the subtle changes they're going to see” – Lyle Kellman, GDIT

“When we talk to organizations and the Department of Defense about security, really where they're starting to see the most understanding is really in securing of the application,” — Daniel Ellis, VMWare

“The Army needs three fundamental things if we're going to accelerate cloud adoption," — Paul Puckett, Army Enterprise Cloud Management Office

“You want to assume the enemies in the network and never trust the network. You want to take every single enterprise resource and authenticate and validate every transaction," — Dave Zukowski, Akamai

"We’re destroying silos and moving faster. There are a few things that are foundational, like a single sign on experience for the warfighter. Those kinds of basic things are what defines an enterprise." — Nicolas Chaillan, Chief Software Officer, USAF

“As a cloud advocate, I believe 100% of applications should be in the cloud," — John Hale, Defense Information Systems Agency

“When we look at being inside the DoDIN from a flexibility and the affordability cost, it's a tremendous benefit," — Jim Matney, GDIT

“Many people look at the private sector and see where they are with cloud and look at the Department of Defense, and think, ‘Wow, they seem to be behind the power curve. Actually, I don't think that's the case," — Mark Valentine, Microsoft

“Building our cloud capabilities is about investing in our workforce, because they are going to be the catalyst for our future," — Eileen Vidrine, Department of the Air Force

“A lot of the questions we get at the senior levels of DoD are, 'I have a data lake or have large amounts of information I can't afford, how do I get that data up and out and manage a cloud," — David Cerjan, Veritas Technologies

Over the next four-to-six months, you’re going to start to see API-driven self-service deployments. What used to take nine to 12 months, we’re really trying to reduce the barrier and get it into a week’s time.” – Travis Methvin, Navy PEO-Digital

“We've been working very closely with the [Navy] cybersecurity representatives all the way up and down the chain, to make sure that we're getting the right information out of tool chains for software-building security,” – Jeff Luckett, GDIT

“The real goal of hybrid cloud, is being able to build an application having optimal flexibility ... And open source is where the innovation to do that is happening” – Stephanie Chiras, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

“Very hardcore science gets done – anything from doing artificial intelligence and machine learning for underneath a hull ... to building UAVs that can both swim and fly,” – Christopher Mayfield, Naval Information Warfare Center

“There are processes and tools that can help you maneuver that data, but they all require time and energy, and they all require somebody to say that's appropriate or not. And so that just takes time," – Rob Carey, Cloudera Government Solutions

How can federal agencies address insider risk? To begin, they need visibility into data movement across their environment, whether endpoints are on or off the network.

As part of our DOD Cloud Exchange event in March, Federal News Network sat down with Hitachi Vantara Federal’s Chief Technology Officer Gary Hix for a virtual chat on all things hybrid cloud.