The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted government agencies to accelerate information technology modernization to facilitate the delivery of citizen services and achieve their missions and Michael Houlihan, senior director for the Department of Defense sales team at VMware (NYSE: VMW), said the government should aim to establish a scalable, adaptable, flexible and future-proof IT infrastructure.
“That infrastructure must bridge private data centers and public clouds and scale up and down for different classification levels, specifically within the Defense Department and the intelligence community,” Houlihan wrote.
Houlihan said agencies have made advances in several modernization areas driven by the health crisis, including telework, modern applications that can operate in any cloud environment and artificial intelligence and machine learning.
He cited as an example the plans of DOD’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to come up with a cloud platform as a service that could help agencies within the department develop their own software and AI and ML tools.
Houlihan said agencies should make cybersecurity the “front and center in any modernization strategy” and explore platforms that enable them to “make security an intrinsic part of their infrastructure.”
He discussed zero trust as one of the security approaches making headway and cited the work of DreamPort, a cyber prototyping and innovation facility, on a zero trust architecture.
