The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has continually worked to identify, adapt and deliver innovative and disruptive commercial technology solutions to enhance safety and effectiveness to maintain a competitive edge.
During Potomac Officers Club’s 2021 Border Protection Innovations and Technology Forum, Ed Mays, executive director of the enterprise data management and engineering directorate at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), will join an expert panel to discuss innovation, emerging technologies and modernization that will support national security.
To register for the 2021 Border Protection Innovations and Technology Forum, as well as view upcoming opportunities, visit Potomac Officers Club’s Event Page.
Innovation teams across CBP have worked to identify and pilot emerging commercial technologies, adapt them for government use and transition proven capabilities. The agency has worked with new technologies, such as Automated Targeting System (ATS), Border Watch and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), to further modernization efforts and advance national security.
Mays recently discussed CBP’s cloud management and integration contract, which will help the agency manage its expanding use of commercial cloud across its operations. CBP’s Enterprise Cloud and Integration Service (ECIS) contract solicitation will be out in the first quarter, or early in the second quarter, of 2021, said Mays.
He noted that the contract will help CBP understand and control proliferating bills and hard-to-track costs for cloud services, as well as a more efficient way to use its stable of commercial cloud service providers. The contract would set an integrator to help CBP acquire and access multiple CSPs, infrastructure, platform and software-as-a-service offerings.
Mays said CBP also has a proof-of-concept underway that will help read and analyze cloud bills from multiple cloud providers and translate them into understandable billing within the CBP enterprise. The effort, he said, could tap artificial intelligence and robotics process automation to conduct tasks.
Additionally, in July 2020, Mays noted that CBP needs more resources to standardize its hybrid cloud environment, which will enable the agency to transfer applications anywhere on the network. Standardizing cloud computing will improve interoperability and enable CBP to use more application programming interfaces in lieu of one-off builds, Mays noted.
“Ultimately our broad goal for hybrid cloud is to be able to build once and migrate anywhere based on the economic conditions at the time and based on the ability to deliver capability to our customers,” Mays said.
CBP needs to be able to do that in an “agile, secure and standardized manner” and “can do a little bit of all of it today,” but the rest will take an “inordinate amount of resources,” he added. “There are challenges there where artificial intelligence can do things much better than a human being.”
Mays will be joined on the panel by experts across the private and public sectors. The panelist will include Benjamine Huffman of CBP and Rob Thorne of DHS. Shamlan Siddiqi, chief technology officer of NTT DATA’s Public Sector will moderate the panel.
Potomac Officers Club will also feature Rachelle Henderson, chief information officer of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as a keynote speaker during the 2021 Border Protection Innovations and Technology Forum.
To register for the 2021 Border Protection Innovations and Technology Forum, as well as view upcoming opportunities, visit Potomac Officers Club’s Event Page.
