Ciena Government Solutions, Inc. (CGSI)—a wholly owned subsidiary of Ciena—has a team of roughly 80 professionals focused exclusively on the federal government,  requiring active security clearances and/or polygraphs. Approximately one-half have security clearances). CGSI currently provides transport and converged packet-optical platforms and solutions across the civilian, defense and national security verticals.

CGSI is expanding its business, operational and mission footprint with current and new federal customers with Ciena’s packet-optical and software offerings. The packet-optical portfolio includes both edge and aggregation platforms, and the software portfolio provides both management and cyber capabilities.

“With our next-generation solutions, we are leveraging our global leadership in transport to extend to Layers 2 and 3. This extension allows CGSI to enter into new and emerging domains like private 5G, SD-WAN and SASE,” said Emily Edmonds, regional sales director for civilian government at Ciena.

Supporting speed and power at the Energy Department

As an example of its technology leadership position, the Energy Department recently turned to CGSI to help design a robust, agile and secure network for its advanced computing experiments and next-generation projects.

DOE and its 17 national labs conduct some of the most advanced computing and networking experiments in the world. For example, the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently earned the number one spot on the TOP500 Project’s list of fastest computers in the world. It’s the first system of its kind to achieve the speed and capacity needed to qualify as exascale, a threshold of 1 quintillion calculations per second. And while it’s the first to achieve that milestone, it’s just one of many exascale projects across different core national laboratories and numerous private sector partners.

And that’s just one of many major initiatives the DOE is working on. To operate at this scale and push the boundaries of computing power, DOE needs solid, reliable and secure infrastructure that can support its workload. The department has massive amounts of data to sift through and analyze, and its bandwidth requirements can be as high as 800G to support projects like exascale. On top of that, the data is extremely sensitive and requires the highest levels of protection from adversaries.

Specialized services

Along with a world-class portfolio for both optical transport, packet and software, CGSI is also establishing a tier one engineering, consulting and cyber practice. This practice can provide tier one consultants for both short-term and long-term engagements, with projects focused on producing specific deliverables or based on hourly rates.

This practice will assist federal agencies who struggle to find, attract and retain employees in the IT and cybersecurity fields. Such employees are highly valued and increasingly rare, and private sector competition to attain that talent is fierce. Agencies often just don’t have the funding to secure and retain these individuals. They need to find other ways to fill the gaps in their workforces and manage their networks. CGSI’s mission is to meet this need with specialized professional services, helping agencies design and manage their enterprise networks so that they can focus on their missions.

Federal agencies tend to build layers of complexity into their networks, working with many different vendors and making it very difficult to troubleshoot or track any security breaches. Complexity is the enemy of security. That’s why CGSI aims to simplify the process by flattening the network.

“You don’t want to be in a situation where you have a security breach, and you’re on the phone with 80 different vendors — from the application layer to the photonic layer — trying to figure out where the breach occurred and who’s responsible,” Edmonds said. “CGSI can help an agency flatten its network and limit the places of ingress or egress, places where bad actors can penetrate your network.”

Private 5G networks and more

CGSI along with its key partners are also helping agencies create private in-building and campus-specific 5G networks. The networks function much like Wi-Fi but are far more secure. With standard Wi-Fi all you need is a password for network access. Private 5G networks, unlike commercial bandwidths, operate on a different government-only spectrum. That means you need a specific, preapproved device to access the network.

This solution can support an abundance of remote workers. It includes what are called “pico cells” that make it possible to remotely access the network securely, similar to using a VPN to access a network from home. That kind of device-level security and authorization checks a lot of boxes on the government’s recent push toward zero trust adoption.

“It’s almost a ‘set it and forget it’ configuration, taking care of the security via your devices and the way that you access the network,” Edmonds said. “So you don’t have to worry about blocking unauthorized people from getting into sensitive networks that shouldn’t be in there. It simplifies IT management, secures the network, and only provides access to authorized users of the private network.”

CGSI has a diverse partner ecosystem that provides, among other things, access to edge solutions like SD-WAN capabilities. With the trend of moving and accessing data in the cloud, agencies need compute at the edge in order to maximize their bandwidth and efficiencies across the network.

CGSI offers solutions that comply with the government’s often increased security requirements. For example, it doesn’t offshore the support for government customers, because federal agencies, especially those dealing with sensitive data, require that only American citizens have access. It offers end-to-end solutions to support and manage an agency’s networks. CGSI can also install, train and turn the networks over to the agencies to manage themselves.

“We’re pretty flexible as to how we support you,” Edmonds said. “We’re here to partner with agencies to make sure that they’re able to support their missions, secure their network and offer some flexibility with solutions that will help them further their mission.”

CGSI’s mission is to support agencies with professional services. It helps agencies design and manage their networks so that they can focus on their missions.

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