An Inside Look at the Pentagon’s Cybersecurity and Workforce Modernization
It looks like 2016 will be a pivotal year for organizations pursuing strategic digital transformation. New technology models have always been critical across U.S. industries, but the stakes are growing increasingly high with the impact of all things related to digital data, automation, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and the high-tech talent pipeline. As IT executives race to proactively drive digital approaches, it’s more compelling than ever to look at how the leaders behind our own national security plan to stay ahead of the curve on land, at sea, and in cyberspace.
Tech Labor Challenges
The Defense Department’s Technical Chief, Terry Halvorsen, recently spoke about the Pentagon’s most pressing IT issues, including centralizing data, maximizing on modernization, and tapping into the cybersecurity workforce. This was in part a response to a recent audit which reported that the DOD will likely not meet its internal goals for consolidating data centers by 60 percent before the end of the 2018 fiscal year. According to the same report, in 2015 the DOD shut just 18 percent of its data centers, a far cry from the 40-percent goal set by the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative.
It looks like 2016 will be a pivotal year for organizations pursuing strategic digital transformation. New technology models have always been critical across U.S. industries, but the stakes are growing increasingly high with the impact of all things related to digital data, automation, cloud computing, cybersecurity, and the high-tech talent pipeline. As IT executives race to proactively drive digital approaches, it’s more compelling than ever to look at how the leaders behind our own national security plan to stay ahead of the curve on land, at sea, and in cyberspace.
For Halvorsen and the DOD, consolidating data centers continues to be a key and challenging priority. The idea is to re-position the department’s IT investments towards more efficient computing platforms, in terms of energy, real estate, and most of all, labor costs. Central to the strategy is replacing manual labor with software automation. Halvorsen explains, “Labor is the single biggest driver. We’ve got to look at how many people are doing what. If you still have a lot of people doing monitoring and maintenance of servers, that is a bad use of people, those processes can be automated.”
As a matter of fact, what Halvorsen is saying isn’t new. It reflects what a variety of business executives have already discovered. Many businesses are shifting their IT budgets and workers’ hours away from managing routine operations. Organizations are integrating automated services for monitoring IT infrastructure and managing data to free-up resources for developing tech talent, solving bigger picture objectives, and driving innovation.
High-Tech Modernization Trends
Halvorsen says that the Defense Department will focus on tech modernization across military branches and defense agencies. This includes a comprehensive upgrade of hardware and aggressively developing joint regional security stacks (JRSS), in collaboration with the Joint Information Environment. The plan also focuses on integrating data center programs with cloud computing into a single “compute and storage strategy.”
The Cloud-First mandate is in sync with the overwhelming trend of IT executives fully embracing cloud applications and infrastructure. Many organizations have also been building digital workflows that consider every layer of the software stack and realign new technology processes. It’s also interesting to note that most major security breaches have not yet exploited cloud systems.
The On-Demand IT Workforce
The recipe for finding the right mix of tech talent has proven to be just as important as the technology itself. The U.S. IT sector employs approximately 5.9 million workers industry-wide. And based on the global growth of the IT market by $1 trillion in 2015, this fiscal year is expected to see the highest IT job growth rate in over a decade. While the IT industry is still the largest employer of IT workers, industries across the U.S. economy have been ramping up their investments in cybersecurity, IT support, software development, and data analytics.
The Defense Department is reorganizing its cybersecurity workforce and pooling talent from new and unexpected sources. The Pentagon’s strategy to enlist an army of on-demand workers across the tech industry, outsourced on a contract basis. Halvorsen says, “The years of having an IT or cyber career completely within the federal or civilian cycle” are coming to an end. He continues, “We want to put industry people into DOD and put DOD people into industry.” Integrating experts from the tech industry with U.S. defense veterans may also ignite exciting possibilities for a “cross-pollination of innovation” and a “mutually beneficial relationship” for the foreseeable future.
