Agencies cannot set it and leave it, so to speak.

For agency leaders to understand how best to secure the cloud, they need both the data and a strategy that prioritizes mission critical systems and information.

It’s clear that chief information security officers and other agency security leaders must have the right tools and processes to ensure the transition to cloud services happens quickly and safely.

Agencies must get the security right because the move to the cloud isn’t slowing down. Deltek, the market research firm, expects civilian agencies to spend more than $2.1 billion on cloud services this year alone.

Deltek also found that agencies are using more cloud-based cyber tools, with data encryption, continuous monitoring, multilayered defenses and identity access management being the most popular.

Juliana Vida, the chief technical advisor for public sector at Splunk, said for agencies to successfully and securely move to the cloud they must collect, use and understand their data. She said many times that comes down to using the right security framework.

“We all need to be thinking about security because I think the world has learned by now there are enough bad actors out there looking for that precious data. They can sell it or they can use it for ransomware to get money from us. There are plenty of bad people out there and bad actors whose capabilities have gone beyond our ability to just manage it,” Vida said on The Road to Multi Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Success, Managing Security and Complexity sponsored by Splunk. “We all need to really be thinking about how do we leverage technology to help us keep the bad guys out and keep from getting at our data because it’s no longer protected by a firewall or otherwise?”

The data becomes even more important as agencies will remain in a hybrid cloud environment for the foreseeable future.

Vida said on average agencies are using 7.3 different cloud providers creating more complexity to secure and manage their data.

“When you start to stitch all of those [cloud instances] together, what becomes very clear, is the need for visibility, not just within each of those environments, but across those environments. I don’t think this is going to be a shocker to anybody, but every cloud vendor is not really keen on helping you manage your data when you move it into another vendor’s cloud environment. That makes it even harder to manage. But still, the benefits of cloud far outweigh the risks of just staying on-premise,” Vida said. “Agencies and organizations cannot be talking about mission execution without in the next breadth talk about and who’s keeping it secure, how are we monitoring the cloud and who’s going to make sure that if there’s a hack tomorrow, how quickly can we isolate that and move on to execute our mission?”

Vida said this is why concepts like zero trust are front-and-center with more data and applications moving to the edge.

“Agencies need to know where their data is, know what’s happening from end-to-end. The phrase used to be you can’t secure what you can’t see, well, that’s true. You can’t secure it. You also can’t manage it. You can’t predict what it’s going to do. You can’t manage it as you would manage any other valuable asset,” she said. “Not having the kind of oversight, control, governance, predictability with the data, is a problem because data has become as valuable, if not more valuable, than tangible financial assets.”

Agencies need better end-to-end visibility of their data and how it relates to security.

“You can have better visibility of your data but it’s also the people because they just can’t manage it anymore. The volume of data is just too great to put it on the shoulders of those analysts,” Vida said. “Let’s give people the tools that can help them do what they are really skilled at doing so automation, and orchestration can help. All of those capabilities rely on data. There has to be enough trusted data coming in from any source, any format, wherever it’s coming in from, but there has to be enough data coming in to allow those advanced capabilities to actually work.”

Moving to the Cloud

When you start to stitch all of those [cloud instances] together, what becomes very clear, is the need for visibility, not just within each of those environments, but across those environments. I don't think this is going to be a shocker to anybody, but every cloud vendor is not really keen on helping you manage your data when you move it into another vendor’s cloud environment. That makes it even harder to manage. But still, the benefits of cloud far outweigh the risks of just staying on-premise.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

End-to-End Visibility

Let's give people the tools that can help them do what they are really skilled at doing so automation, and orchestration can help. All of those capabilities rely on data. There has to be enough trusted data coming in from any source, any format, wherever it's coming in from, but there has to be enough data coming in to allow those advanced capabilities to actually work.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

Listen to the full show:

The post Reducing the complexity of hybrid cloud through better data first appeared on Federal News Network.

Agencies now must sustain the momentum gained from the efforts to meet the surge of remote workers. How they do that is having the ability to monitor and manage these transformations to ensure mission success.

This could mean gaining a better understanding of what applications, systems and data are in the cloud and how they are responding to employee and citizen needs.

This could mean expanding their use of DevSecOps to deliver capabilities more quickly.

And this could mean harnessing their data to make better security decisions that help drive agencies toward better mission outcomes.

As with most things, this all comes back to the data. Agencies need to have the right data, understand what the data says and get that data to the right leaders to make decisions.

Agencies must do all of that and use that information to continue their digital transformation journey and improve mission delivery.

Juliana Vida, the chief technical advisor for public sector at Splunk, said some of the common trends she is seeing across agencies is acceleration, reciprocity, execution and agency level attention or focus on data.

“This is new. I would not have said that a year ago, I think all of us would have been still struggling with my stakeholders across the agency who don’t understand the importance of data, who don’t understand how much value data can bring to the agency’s mission,” she said. “If we harness the power and the value and the goodness of all the data that’s across our environment, things will change so much in a positive direction.”

The Food and Drug Administration is experiencing that kind of change.

Ram Iyer, the FDA chief data officer, said his office is acting as the “connective tissue” between programs and helping the agency move to a product mindset from a project mindset.

“It’s been a very important part of our digital transformation story, and also it is a data story. It has also increased our understanding of the breadth of ways to use these data sets, and then how the data modernization as well as the technology modernization go hand-in-hand to meet these objectives,” Iyer said. “The data is a critical part of all of these journeys as it is to our technology modernization initiative.”

Digital Transformation Progress

We are really in a time where the pandemic has demonstrated that we are not equipped to be able to execute quickly. So we're building processes and policies that enable us now to deliver capabilities in such a rapid way and then securely to so that we can get those capabilities out in the field. There's multiple techniques that we're using, like coding low and deploying high to allow us to be able to work remotely and actually still code. There's a ton of different security ideas. The continuous authority to operate is something that's proliferated in the army now started really with the Air Force.

Hannah Hunt

Chief Product and Innovation Officer, Software Factory, Army Futures Command

Success Stories

They were able to find efficiencies in those processes and how they send all those people out to do the census, the work of the Census Bureau, by leveraging data….that benefits us all. So that's a real mission outcome, and an all driven by a focus on not only how do we gather data and capture data, but then use it to make decisions and take action, because that's where the value proposition is.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

Data-Driven Decision-Making

A lot of our users are at home in a telework-enhanced environment and so is their endpoint. We are still able to capture that endpoint data and application data and have it actually flow through our security information and event management (SIEM), in which we use Splunk for, has been critical for us because that is where, as a CISO, I'm able to understand any of the vulnerabilities or potential vulnerabilities or challenges to the data. That is has been a success because we had that structure set up in place, and when the pandemic happened, we were pleased to know that we still received all of that data. So from a security operations center perspective, that was a good news story because that showed our resiliency and the resiliency of the platform as well. We still were able to capture that data, use that data and again, make security informed decisions as well.

Venice Goodwine

Chief Information Security Officer, United States Department of Agriculture

Listen to the full show:

The post Using data to spur digital transformation, better cybersecurity first appeared on Federal News Network.

The zero trust premise holds that it takes more than a simple user name and password to enable secure access, whether on premise or remotely. It requires continuous identification and authentication throughout even a single session, with algorithms evaluating characteristics of the user – behaviors, IP addresses, authentication factors offered. Zero trust must operate as an orchestrated service, with the ability to monitor its own available and potential for interruption.

It’s all a data driven operation. As detailed in this interview with two high level federal cybersecurity practitioners, zero trust is informed by many data sources. Some are generated by the agency, such as network activity logs. Others come from both government-generated and commercially provided security telemetry, such that uses gain trust in the context of what is known about the security environment.

In the video interview moderated by Federal News Network’s Tom Temin, Sean Connelly of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Air Force Brigadier General Chad Raduege, the cyberspace and information dominance director at the Air Combat Command, talk about how to gain trust, the data and workflows required, and the organizational constructs that best foster trust.

How the Security Approach Has Morphed

You can enrich your access controls with telemetry, those intel feeds. So when the policy enforcement point is making decisions, it can look at what we know of the adversaries, and what the commercial products know, and decide if this is a trusted user or does this have some of the ways the adversary would be trying to establish trust also.

Sean Connelly

TIC Program Manager, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency

Cybersecurity Workflows

I think that zero trust, future, this zero trust strategy is all about. It's thinking about the old perimeter security, and it's now thinking about how do you protect the data, whether that's in transit or whether that's it rest.

Brigadier General Chad Raduege

Director of Cyberspace and Information Dominance, Headquarters Air Combat Command, U.S. Air Force

Listen to the full show:

The post Trust whom your data tells you to first appeared on Federal News Network.

Data-Driven Decisions for Telework

These are all data problems. If I have the right information at my fingertips I can make rapid data-driven decisions. Decision makers need the right data at the right time to make confident decisions in carrying out the mission.

Frank Dimina

Vice President, Public Sector, Splunk

The Path to Reopening

We are showing customers how to leverage their data and use dashboards to make decisions in a way that keeps their workforce healthy and safe, while also meeting the demand for services. We are starting to talk to agencies about what they will do next? What you do next is build upon what you’ve done during COVID-19 and don’t lose the momentum. You can’t go back.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

It’s been an incredible past few months for many federal agencies. Mandatory telework stressed their networks and technology infrastructures like never before.

Agencies tried to prepare for the surge in telework, but many struggled during the first few weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.

Many agencies, however, quickly upgraded their networks and adjusted their approaches to address shortcomings in their telework efforts.

Two Federal News Network surveys about six weeks a part found much different views of remote working.

The first survey from March found employees were concerned about virtual private networks (VPNs), latency in networks and lack of laptops.

Six weeks later, many of those problems seem to have been solved. Federal CIO Suzette Kent said in early May that the ability to rapidly pivot and transition to this highly digital environment is possible because of recent investments in modern technology, robust and scalable commercial tools, data management practices, cybersecurity enhancement, and automation.

Agencies made the transformation during the pandemic emergency in a short amount of time and now they have to figure out how to continue this momentum.

Frank Dimina, the vice president for public sector at Splunk, said the coronavirus emergency was a huge litmus test for business continuity planning and one that really put agency continuity of operations (COOP) plans and policies to the test.

Dimina said agencies had to overcome two big challenges—capacity and security, and the surge in the demand for digital services.

“These are all data problems. If I have the right information at my fingertips I can make rapid data-driven decisions,” Dimina said on the show Good to Great: Lessons for Agencies as they Re-open sponsored by Splunk. “Decision makers need the right data at the right time to make confident decisions in carrying out the mission.”

Once agencies made it through that first month, many took a step back to better understand their challenges of maintaining a remote work environment for a longer period of time. Dimina said whether it was through a simple data call or a more complex set of analysis, agencies grasped how to reallocate resources to invest in solving the long-term problems.

Juliana Vida, the chief technical advisor for public sector at Splunk, said those agencies with modern technologies like cloud and shared services in use were more agile and could scale more quickly when going from 20% telework to 95% telework.

She said the ability of agencies with modern technology infrastructures to meet citizen demands is one of the biggest lessons from the pandemic.

“The increase in services has skyrocketed, specifically for certain agencies around healthcare, telehealth, telemedicine and small businesses with loans,” Vida said. “When you think back to 2013 when HHS rolled out the website for the Affordable Care Act, they at least had some preparation. They knew it was coming and had time to prepare. In this case, federal agencies didn’t necessarily have that and went from 0 to 60 pretty quickly in the U.S. particularly on the east coast as the pandemic rolled from west to east.”

Dimina added the pandemic has given agencies a new perspective on software-as-a-service.

“Cloud ensured they had no interruption of services. They didn’t have to refactor their tools or processes just to complete their day-to-day work streams. They were also able to scale up as these increases in digital demands and users working from home required more capacity, these cloud-based approaches allowed them to increase scaling in just a few clicks. They didn’t have to wait on hardware procurement or data center space. There is a lot more value potentially in the way we look at these cloud SaaS based offerings. Cloud benefits are not always about cost. It’s about agility, redundancy, resiliency and scalability.”

Vida said agencies now have to find the balance of meeting citizen expectations, delivering services and maintaining a healthy and safe workplace for employees.

“We are showing customers how to leverage their data and use dashboards to make decisions in a way that keeps their workforce healthy and safe, while also meeting the demand for services,” Vida said. “We are starting to talk to agencies about what they will do next? What you do next is build upon what you’ve done during COVID-19 and don’t lose the momentum. You can’t go back.”

If the last three months proved like never before the value of cloud and modern technologies, Dimina said now agencies can move into the artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics process automation to further gain efficiencies and serve citizens better.

He said data can support these next steps to modernization as well as bringing employees back to the office.

“From a strategic perspective, there is a real opportunity here to make data more accessible and usable for everyone. This is a change of increasing data democracy or a chance to make data more open and more usable by more people,” Dimina said. “The best way data can be used by government right now is by enabling the front line workers with access to data so they can make decisions in real time. What this means for public sector is that you are taking a data-driven approach for reach job function. I’m not talking about spending more money on tools. This can be leveraging data that’s already collected.”

Vida added that the successes of remote working, online collaboration and an accelerated digital transformation will continue to grow and evolve.

“We’ve seen that people realized a lot of those previously held assumptions and barriers were false,” she said. “It’s been a workplace transformation. It’s a different way of how we think about what it means to go to work.”

Listen to the full show:

The post How data can drive your IT modernization efforts faster first appeared on Federal News Network.

Cloud migration and deployments can often best be looked at as data exercises. After all, it’s data that powers applications, digital services, and analytics. Moreover, data produced by all of the network infrastructure activities can be analyzed to improve the migration process, cybersecurity and IT agility.

Watch and listen as two experts from Splunk discuss the chief considerations, challenges and benefits of continuing the march to a hybrid cloud strategy encompassing all of an agency’s strategic data assets.

Benefits of the Cloud in Modernization

The biggest thing about cloud is, what are people looking to achieve? What outcomes are people looking for? Cloud is an enabler for mission outcomes or innovating faster … security, flexibility, agility.

Andy Hershey

Global Area Vice President, Cloud Sales and Go-to-Market Transformation, Splunk

Use Cases

[At CMS] transitioning to cloud resulted in just a faster time to value for Medicaid recipients. And security. Think pf the PHI and PII information that they process. And the scale to analyze this huge volume of data. This would have been much more expensive, slower and harder to scale in their own data center.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

The Complexity of Moving to the Cloud

By leveraging data you have through an analytics platform, you can understand where you stand, and check your progress as you go, making your [cloud] migration initiative seamless. With the right platform you don’t have to worry about data ingestion, normalization or standardization. It’s done for you.

Andy Hershey

Global Area Vice President, Cloud Sales and Go-to-Market Transformation, Splunk

Listen to the full show:

The post Cloud migration and management go better with a data-analytics driven approach first appeared on Federal News Network.

Challenges Associated with Agencies Delivering Their Mission

The speed and the velocity of the decisions that public sector leaders have to make has increased, and the criticality or impact of those decisions is increasing as well. Getting every decision right could make or break the mission. That’s ultimately the challenge today. How can I make decisions faster? And how can I be more confident in each decision that I make?

Frank Dimina

Vice President, Public Sector, Splunk

Data Reuse

If agencies look at their data, they will realize they have a resource that they might not have known was there.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

When it comes to IT modernization, the old adage it’s not about the technology, it’s about the culture applies now more than ever.

Agencies need to transform by encouraging an agile approach, by taking smart risks and reskilling their workforces to understand what it takes for change to take hold.

One way to jumpstart this culture change is through data.

The White House recognized this and made leveraging data as a strategic asset a cross-agency priority goal.

The most recent update to the President’s Management Agenda showed governmentwide progress to make data more valuable. Last year, the team developed a data leadership playbook describing how agencies can develop governance and create a more mature infrastructure.

In 2020, the cross-agency priority goal lists 10 actions ranging from the simple launch of a chief data officers council to the more complicated to updating data inventories for completeness to creating priority data sprints.

All of these efforts will help agencies use data to drive IT modernization and thus change culture.

Frank Dimina, the vice president of public sector for Splunk, said there are ways agencies can institutionalize change and take more advantage of data.

“The speed and the velocity of the decisions that public sector leaders have to make has increased, and the criticality or impact of those decisions is increasing as well. Getting every decision right could make or break the mission,” Dimina said on the Data Analytics Platform for the Mission show sponsored by Splunk. “That’s ultimately the challenge today. How can I make decisions faster? And how can I be more confident in each decision that I make?”

Over the past decade or more, the velocity, volume and variety of data has been overwhelming agencies, and with the understanding that “dark data” or untapped data exists across disparate databases, the need to get a hold of this information is more important than ever.

“This same challenge also is the solution to many of the challenges the public sector are dealing with,” Dimina said. “We often talk about a state of data leverage. That is when an agency or education institution is using its data that it generates to extract value. How can I make better decisions? How can I solve some of these mission problems by using data as my source of truth and what’s making those decisions more confidently and faster?”

Basically, Dimina said what it comes down to is every problem is a data problem.

Juliana Vida, the chief technical advisor at Splunk and a retired Naval officer, said getting a hold of this untapped and unused data is key to fixing many of these problems.

“If agencies look at their data, they will realize they have a resource that they might not have known was there,” she said. “We have one customer, a national lab, who is using their data to do what a lot our customers do, initially for cybersecurity.

But what they started to realize is they can use that same data to address a financial issue, which was to eliminate unnecessary license purchases that they’ve made. They didn’t go into this thinking they would save money on licenses if we start with cybersecurity. But as they started to dig in to the data and get more curious about what else they could do with the data, they ended up having a 30% savings in licenses expenditures.”

Dimina said this customer provides a great example of how data can drive not just cybersecurity, but improve efforts around IT modernization, compliance mandates and workforce reskilling.

“We are not just talking about collecting data. This is a new approach. There are many technologies out there that help you collect it and it’s still a challenge that hasn’t been solved,” he said. “What we are talking about is operationalizing data. How do I actually use data in a way where I have it at my fingers when I need it?”

Dimina said Splunk follows a four-step model investigate, monitor, analyze and act to help agencies mature their data processes.

“A lot of the problems public sector folks deal with is in that investigative part, that first phase,” he said. “If you think about the main task of someone who works in government today, they are often asked, ‘what happened and why did it happen?’ That is one of those things where being able to conduct investigations, having access to data and be able to bring all these sources together creates visibility so you can ask questions with confidence.”

Once agencies mature their investigative processes, Dimina said they can start taking advantage of advanced analytics using artificial intelligence and machine learning tools.

Dimina said those tools likely will lead to broader data reuse to improve customer service or save money by understanding software licenses.

There is no better sign that agencies are seeing the importance and value of data than the rise of the chief data officer. The Evidence Based Policymaking Act required agencies to name a CDO by last July, but below the surface the data governance boards working on taxonomies and standards and putting data experts in mission areas may even be more important steps in tapping into the dark data.

Vida said a big part of this effort to extract more value out of the data is making sure the workforce has the right skillsets. She said not everyone needs to have a PhD in data science or coding, but data literacy is an important first step.

Listen to the full show:

The post How to make data a resource for every mission first appeared on Federal News Network.

The Current State of Continuous Monitoring

If you look at the core design tenets of CDM when the program was initiated, to create better visibility, better awareness of cybersecurity issues across the .gov domain. They’ve effectively done that. Security visibility has improved.

Frank Dimina

Vice President, Public Sector, Splunk

CDM Data Collection

If only 10 or 20 percent of data [collected] is used for that dashboard, what about all that untapped value left there in that data for the agency? There’s an incredible opportunity for agencies to improve their cyber postures.

Frank Dimina

Vice President, Public Sector, Splunk

CDM Plans for the Future

To accomplish more effective risk management … is moving from that reporting, compliance mindset to that operational, action-oriented mindset.

Frank Dimina

Vice President, Public Sector, Splunk

The large federal agencies are all deep into the discovery program known as continuous diagnostics and mitigation. The dozens of smaller agencies are getting into CDM, aided in part by cloud-hosted tools that enable flexible and lower cost ways of knowing and watching what’s going on in their IT assets.

Progress to date gets a success rating from Frank Dimina, the vice president for public sector at Splunk. The company makes software for integrating, normalizing visualizing and otherwise making data from network sensors understandable and actionable. In this video interview with Federal News Network’s Tom Temin, Dimina says that while there’s a long way to go, CDM has given agencies visibility in the cybersecurity threats throughout the .gov domain.

In the next stage of CDM, Dimina says, agencies will realize more value from the data they gather, analyzing for threat hunting and active cyber response. That will happen when agencies figure out how to more readily share that data internally. In many cases, CDM data isn’t shared with the one group that could make the best use of it, namely the security operations centers. He said the challenge for CDM is to turn it from a visibility and awareness program to an operational one.

In the meantime, Dimina says, the request-for-services model initiated by Homeland Security Department and the General Services Administration helps ensure individual agencies get the CDM program tailored to their individual needs.

Moving CDM to an operational construct implies the need to take it from a compliance effort. Otherwise it would become a missed opportunity, Dimina says, adding the government has an opportunity to take a more modernized, operational approach.

Doing so requires thinking differently about the current goal of the program, namely the agency and governmentwide reporting dashboards. The dashboard output will continue to be important, Dimina says, but it won’t be enough. The data forming the dashboards is only a fraction of the data collected, so agencies’ next goal should be to use the rest of the data in an action-oriented analytics environment.

Watch the video to hear Dimina detail how CDM can go to the next level.

Listen to the full show:

The post How to take CDM to the next level first appeared on Federal News Network.

IT Modernization Trends

People are sharing information. It’s just agencies have struggled with how do they capture what’s being given to them, frankly, freely, and use it to make better decisions and take action.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

It’s All About the Data

A lot of that information that citizens are giving is lost. It’s not harnessed. It’s not harvested. It’s not used for any purpose. And that is what Splunk does. We can suck up all that content and make it usable so that the government can actually make decisions and move faster.

Juliana Vida

Chief Technical Advisor, Public Sector, Splunk

The latest data on IT modernization efforts across the government shows a lot of good news.

If you look at the key performance indicators the Office of Management and Budget releases as part of the President’s Management Agenda, you will see 75% of all agency email is in the cloud. That is up by three percent over December 2018.

If you look at the latest Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act or FITARA scorecard, you will see more grades of “A” than ever before. Agencies really took the requirement to manage their software licenses to heart with 20 of 24 agencies receiving the highest grades for that effort. 14 of 24 agencies received “As” or “Bs” in the areas of portfolio reviews and transparency and risk management.

So there is a lot of progress in those areas too.

The biggest surprise from both OMB’s IT modernization results and the FITARA scorecard is cybersecurity. Both of these reviews indicate agencies continue to struggle with securing their networks and data.

Under FTIARA, for example, there were 3 “As” and 4 “Bs” so 7 of 24 showed they are doing well.

Under the PMA key performance metrics, OMB says there has been more progress on specific initiatives like software and hardware asset management where 17 and 16 agencies, respectively, have met the goals. But you see continued struggles around important protections like intrusion detection and prevention and authorization management.

And if you remember the whole reason agencies are on this modernization journey is because of the stark realization back in 2015 that these old systems, this technical debt, were too hard to protect and only getting harder.

Juliana Vida, the chief technical advisor public sector for Splunk, said there is hope and there is opportunity, both of which can be found in the data.

“People are sharing information. It’s just agencies have struggled with how do they capture what’s being given to them, frankly, freely, and use it to make better decisions and take action,” Vida said on the Innovation in Government show. “You’ve got to focus on the base. It’s like building a house on sand. The technologies are there, but without the right focus on harnessing, capturing, analyzing and using the right data, they are sub-optimized.”

To gather and make sense of the data, Vida said agencies need to institute a culture change. She isn’t talking about the often trite expression that comes with every new technology initiative. Rather, Vida said agencies need to adjust and adapt to their customers’ modern needs and habits.

“The vision should be modernization to execute on the mission,” she said. “When we talk with agencies and customers, we try to tie their technical needs to their mission. That’s really the only way to be successful. That includes keeping people educated, making sure they get training opportunities and making sure they see themselves as part of the future vision and not just doing the same job that they’ve done for the however many years because things are changing too fast.”

One thing agencies need to keep in mind is who really is their customer and how are they interacting and collecting information from them.

“A lot of that information that citizens are giving is lost. It’s not harnessed. It’s not harvested. It’s not used for any purpose. And that is what Splunk does. We can suck up all that content and make it usable so that the government can actually make decisions and move faster,” Vida said. “Most agencies have a website, a presence or a community of interest. But the problem whatever information is coming from that customer community is often not leveraged. It’s not leveraged in a way that informs policy or informs technology buying decisions or informs future strategy. It’s a nice to have.”

Vida said all of this is information is considered “dark data.” She said only about 30% to 40% of all the data available is ever used.

“There is all this untapped dark data that could be helping to drive better decisions, but it’s never discovered,” she said.

As agencies tap into that “dark data,” they will need help processing and analyzing it. Vida said that’s where the cloud artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics process automation can play larger roles.

“Often what I’ve seen at a federal employee myself and then with industry is the data piece has been pushed off to the side because it’s hard. There are privacy issues. There are legal issues. The data strategy has been slow to come along because that’s the hard piece,” she said. “Without getting your arms around that, you will not get to a real efficient cloud instance or hybrid instance.”

Federal Chief Information Officer Suzette Kent recently talked about the data strategy can get agencies to the cloud and modernized technology faster.

Vida said the strategy will help agencies and vendors think about data and what technologies they need.

“The challenge that we often see is how agencies will go about capturing their data, what vendors they will partner with and what technologies and capabilities do they actually need. Those details are really important,” she said. “It’s one thing to have a 10 year modernization plan. It’s another to empower the agencies and the operators within those agencies to go after the technologies they need, to get out there and talk to the vendors and quickly get those capabilities because they are moving too fast. In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges is all the bureaucracy in place, the paperwork, the process and the processes. That is old legacy thinking. That is not the thinking that is going to get the right capabilities into the hands of users, citizens, warfighter and those who want to make the world a better place.”

About Splunk

Splunk Inc. (NASDAQ: SPLK) was founded to pursue a disruptive new vision: make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone. Organizations use market-leading Splunk solutions with machine learning to monitor, investigate and act on all forms of business, IT, security, and Internet of Things (IoT) data. Use Splunk software in the cloud and on-premises to improve service levels, reduce operations costs, mitigate security risks, enable compliance, enhance DevOps collaboration and create new product and service offerings. Join millions of passionate users by trying Splunk software for free: www.splunk.com/free-trials.

The post Through data, agencies can achieve much needed culture, technology change first appeared on Federal News Network.