When your largest client is the U.S. government, the mission is critical.
Unlike the private sector, where damage from cyberattacks is usually financial, the federal sector has much more to lose because of national security. As government organizations move their applications from legacy mainframes to the cloud, security and cost management are key.
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) strives to be the best in the business. The technology integrator helps their government clients modernize IT systems and manage cybersecurity risks. As we know, however, this is much easier said than done—especially with so much on the line.
Digital Transformation Challenges
SAIC faces complex challenges in its journey to help government agencies modernize IT:
- Help government customers adopt more secure, enterprise cloud services.
- Micro-segment networks to promptly and effectively isolate cyber threats.
- Optimize cloud cost management for the public sector.
- Facilitate better technology business management conversations.
“We’re seeing a dramatic shift toward technology modernization, and we have to have frameworks to deliver consistent governance across disparate cloud platforms,” says Coby Holloway, vice president of IT Modernization at SAIC. “We want to help our customers accelerate and optimize their adoption of cloud services by giving them a cloud management platform that will serve as the anchor for governance, security and workflow.”
Enabling Transformation with Cloud Innovation
[embed]https://youtu.be/ElaGxKfEwQg[/embed]
With hybrid cloud automation and provisioning, SAIC helps make government technology competitive with the private sector. SAIC enables customers with a cloud management platform to broker and oversee the delivery of cloud services. SAIC and its customers can now provision resources and entire platforms that meet all applicable government security standards within minutes.
“The U.S. government has 7,000-plus critical infrastructure applications. Giving those application owners tools to modernize those applications is extremely important. One of the ways we do that is with enterprise cloud services,” says Holloway. “That’s going to really unlock the ability of government to put more energy on their mission and less of it into the distractions of managing an IT service.”
Embracing Cloud Networking & Intrinsic Security
[embed]https://youtu.be/-jLAUER2v5I[/embed]
“We partner with the government to create new security services and new ways of engaging and protecting the nation’s most critical information assets,” says Holloway. “We view the combination of automation and software-defined networking, like we get with NSX Data Center, as being fundamental to being able to respond to the types of cyberthreats facing our nation and our customers today.”
Using a software-defined networking fabric for delivering virtual security appliances and virtual networking, SAIC now explores new opportunities to provide enhanced security services to the government. Those new opportunities include next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning advancements to keep our data—and nation—safe and secure.
“We can put machine learning and artificial intelligence in the data center fabric, interface it with NSX Data Center and then have the network react to cyberthreats much faster than an operator on a keyboard,” says Holloway.
