Narrowing the Divide Between Federal and Commercial Tech INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
NARROWING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN FEDERAL AND COMMERCIAL TECH
Executive Summary Government and the private sector are allies, but you might not know it from observing technology acquisitions. Every day, agencies try to stay connected with commercial businesses despite using aging, oldfashioned tools. Over time, the closeness between both sides will shrink unless the public sector learns from its commercial partners. Unfortunately, numerous burdens weigh down agencies’ efforts to match their private-sector peers. Many agencies have tight budgets and inefficient procurement processes that are often not conducive to rapid changes in technology. Meanwhile, the cybersecurity threats endangering federal IT change quickly. Public servants are struggling to adjust their workflows when the tools they use slowly evolve. These pressures are preventing agencies from keeping pace with private-sector businesses. Collectively, these burdens are widening the divide between the public and private sectors across multiple areas, including data, cloud computing, cybersecurity and IT infrastructure. As problems such as evolving cybersecurity risks fester, it becomes harder for agencies to serve citizens and accomplish their missions effectively. 81% of government agencies reviewed by the GAO saved a combined total of $291M by using Cloud services. Nearly 94% of those agencies improved customer service and had more cost-effective options for managing IT. -Congressional research service report Cloud computing can help. By adopting cloud, agencies modernize both their IT and operations. Cloud also enables advanced analytics, which helps agencies understand their data and make smarter decisions in real time. In addition, cloud enables innovation in areas such as security. For instance, cloud can serve as a platform for automated cybersecurity patching, which rapidly corrects any flaws in an agency’s software coding.
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GovLoop partnered with SAP National Security Services (NS2), an enterprise software solutions provider, for this report on narrowing the divide between federal and commercial technology. In the following pages, we explain how cloud can help agencies implement new tools and use their data for innovation. We also share insights from multiple thought leaders at SAP NS2’s 2019 Security & Innovation Summit.
How Agencies can Narrow the Divide Accelerate your transition to the cloud with Cloud Smart •
Ensure ROI: agencies must consider how to use their current resources to maximize value
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Choose the right vendor: Agencies need to find trustworthy vendors that can keep their sensitive, citizen data safe
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Educate workforce: Upskill, retrain, and recruit key talent for cybersecurity, acquisition, and cloud engineering.
Innovate using Advanced Analytics: •
Predict the unknown using machine learning
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Control the chaos with a unified data fabric
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Gain intelligent perspectives in real-time with analytic insights
INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
Navigating Digital Transformation With Cloud Smart Cloud’s agility, flexibility and security make it a powerful engine for innovation. But because of the challenges it presents, cloud adoption is easier said than done. Buying the right cloud takes energy, time and money. Securing cloud means protecting the data it contains. Employees must adjust their routines to fit cloud or they’ll miss its advantages. Fortunately, the federal government has a strategy to prepare agencies for cloud adoption. Finalized in 2019, Cloud Smart offers a guide for readying agencies’ procurement, security and workforces for cloud.
Ensuring ROI Some agencies are not seeing returns on their cloud investments because of suboptimal cloud purchases. Cloud Smart advises agencies to buy cloud intelligently and offers tips such as how to avoid long-term contracts that lock them in with one vendor. “In a pre-cloud environment, one of the first things you had to do on a new project was spend millions of dollars on hardware,” said Kyle Rice, SAP NS2’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). “You already had half the money out the door before you’d done anything productive. So, cloud helps you solve an acquisition problem as well as a technology problem.” “By leveraging modern technologies and practices, agencies will be able to harness new capabilities and expand existing abilities to enable their mission and deliver services to the public faster.” - Suzette Kent, U.S. Federal Chief Information Officer
Choosing the Right Vendor Cybersecurity is another reason agencies hesitate to adopt cloud services. Agencies need to find trustworthy vendors that can keep their sensitive citizen data safe. Cloud Smart provides agencies with best practices to reduce their risks. For instance, it recommends that agencies continuously monitor their data.
“We have to figure out how to enable and deploy technologies rapidly in a secure environment,” said Mark Testoni, CEO of SAP NS2. “If we don’t do this right, the bad guys are going to win.”
Education Workforces are perhaps the biggest obstacle to using cloud. Employees who don’t understand cloud enough to use it properly will miss its full potential. To address this concern, Cloud Smart urges agencies to identify potential skills gaps in their workforce. “We have probably about a million jobs in IT in this country right now that we can’t source,” Testoni said. “One of the ways to address that is how we train people. We’ve got to reskill our workforce for this information economy that’s been growing the last four years.”
Benefits Ultimately, Cloud Smart can help agencies embrace cloud cheaper, faster and more efficiently. Cloud can become a valuable springboard to innovation for agencies, offering an adaptive, reliable platform for their services. It can also support automation and other crucial emerging technologies. Once adopted, cloud can enable many success stories for agencies. It can provide visibility into the cost and volume of their external resources, and quickly host information that meets all applicable security standards. Finally, cloud can become the destination for any number of an agency’s applications, systems and users. Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said technological innovation represents a national security concern for the U.S. because countries that innovate by acquiring better technologies outperform those who don’t. “If you don’t have innovation, you’re not going to have security...Cloud can mean the difference between success and failure.” -Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis
NARROWING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN FEDERAL AND COMMERCIAL TECH
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Weaving Data Fabric With Advanced Analytics The private sector often has the same objectives as the government, so it wants agencies to keep up with the latest innovations. Federal data, such as nationwide citizen demographics, is a resource that can help agencies match their commercial peers’ speed. This valuable information can help agencies imagine new possibilities to serve citizens better. However, data needs context or its insights will remain unclear. A data fabric, which works across clouds and on-premise data, can help agencies understand their data. Combined with cloud’s scalability, a data fabric makes an ideal foundation for advanced analytics on any amount of data. With advanced analytics, agencies can gain intelligent perspectives in real time for smarter decision-making. “Our most critical asset today is data, we’re collecting data in amounts we’ve never seen before... What we forget in our exuberance is that the success of those technologies depends on that data...” - Kiersten Todt
Safeguarding Data Integrity Trustworthy data is vital for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). AI machines mimic human cognitive behaviors, such as learning, making the tools potentially revolutionary. “What we forget in our exuberance is that the success of those technologies depends on that data,” Todt said of the excitement for emerging technologies. “It’s about making sure data isn’t poisoned. The integrity is something we can stand by.” Cloud, then, is a potential game changer for agencies because it can weave all their data together accurately. Agencies can use the resulting data fabric to enable any tool they need for mission success. Data fabric encompasses all an agency’s data from its various locations and sources. Gradually, agencies that combine their data with cloud can become as innovative as any private business.
94%
of enterprises say data and analytics are important to their business growth and digital transformation. - Forbes
73%
On average, between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. - Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst at Forrester
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INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
Leveraging Data Fabric for Speed Walmart captures an immense amount of data about its business. Each week, more than 245 million customers visit Walmart’s nearly 11,000 stores under 71 banners in 27 countries and e-commerce websites in 11 countries. To tackle the need for tremendous processing speed and scale, SAP helped Walmart to put in place a data fabric called Data Café -- built on the SAP HANA platform.
Powering Walmart with the Cloud SAP HANA
200 Process 200 billion rows of data
3 million
Inserts hourly updates at a rate of three million rows per minute
94%
of queries complete in less than two seconds
Speedy
Users can build any query and get an immediate response
How SAP NS2 Can Help Agencies are between a rock and a hard place when acquiring technology. Although they want to innovate like commercial businesses, they must also protect citizen data at all costs. For many agencies, this balancing act keeps them playing catch-up to the public sector on both innovation and security.
their mission-critical workloads. These clouds are designed to draw meaningful insights from the massive volumes of data that agencies handle daily. The subsequent knowledge aids agencies’ decision-making and drives emerging technologies such as AI.
Tools such as those SAP NS2 offers can help agencies reach the same level as top commercial enterprises. For starters, consider SAP NS2’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud. It delivers secure, enterprise software that can enable sweeping innovation for agencies.
More importantly, data doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Agencies can become nimbler about managing their workforce resources by using clouds such as SAP NS2’s to understand their data. Such clouds can provide visibility into human resources (HR), project management and supply-chain logistics agencywide. Analyzed together, these assets give leaders a complete picture of an agency’s processes and employees.
Clouds such as SAP NS2’s facilitate advanced data analytics that help agencies fully comprehend
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Community Voices GovLoop attended SAP NS2’s 2019 Security & Innovation Summit in October 2019. The following are some of the best quotes from presenters who appeared at the event. The event covered topics including cloud, cybersecurity, IT management and more.
“The cloud is like heaven. Everyone wants to go there, they just don’t want to go there today. The cloud is something we have to secure, and we’re all a little bit scared of it.”
“You’re not going to rub the belly of a server and tell it how good it’s being. You’re not going to touch hardware at all. This isn’t about giving up control. But what you need to do tomorrow is different than what you do today.” – Jon Holladay,
Former Chief Financial Officer of the Agriculture Department
– Kiersten Todt
former Executive Director of the Presidential Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity
“In terms of our military operations, cyberspace is already a warfighting domain. I think that the danger is that some countries are like children juggling light bulbs full of nitroglycerine. Something’s going to go wrong.”
“We’re not moving with the speed that’s necessary to address the gap between the government and the private sector. The fundamental problem is not sharing between governments – it’s sharing between the government and the private sector.”
– Jim Mattis
Former Defense Secretary
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INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE
– John Carlin
former Assistant Attorney General at the Justice Department’s National Security Division
Conclusion For too long, financial, labor and security weights have hindered agencies trying to reach the same heights as commercial entities. Cloud can change that by bridging the gulf between both parties. Initially, cloud can weave a rich data fabric for agencies that informs them with advanced analytics. After that, cloud can nurture emerging technologies, such as automation, that can become game changers for agencies. The icing on the cake is that cloud can smoothly perform both functions while keeping agencies’ data secure. At day’s end, the innovation that cloud fosters can assist agencies with offering the best possible customer experience for citizens. This innovation can help agencies achieve mission success in record time. Eventually, the distance growing between government and commercial technology and workforces will start to disappear. Visit cloud.cio.gov if you would like to learn more about Cloud Smart. In addition, you can visit sapns2.com to understand the array of services SAP NS2 can provide to help streamline your operations.
ABOUT SAP NS2
ABOUT GOVLOOP
Powering the Intelligent Enterprise
GovLoop’s mission is to “connect government to improve government.” We aim to inspire public-sector professionals by serving as the knowledge network for government. GovLoop connects more than 300,000 members, fostering cross-government collaboration, solving common problems and advancing government careers. GovLoop is headquartered in Washington, D.C., with a team of dedicated professionals who share a commitment to connect and improve government.
SAP National Security Services (SAP NS2) was founded with the mission of security in mind. We offer a unique combination of startup agility and global stability to give our clients a competitive edge. As an independent subsidiary of SAP, we are dedicated to delivering the best of SAP innovation, from cloud and predictive analytics to machine learning and data fusion. We build tailored solutions that leverage some of industry’s best software tools and most talented humans.
For more information about this report, please reach out to info@govloop.com.
At SAP NS2, we help tackle challenges across the national security community and critical infrastructure customers. We believe that innovation and security should go hand in hand. Through the incorporation of the Intelligent Enterprise, we leverage emerging technologies to enable customers to focus on highvalue outcomes.
NARROWING THE DIVIDE BETWEEN FEDERAL AND COMMERCIAL TECH
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