Tech Transforms

Bob Stevens, AVP Public Sector at GitLab joins Tech Transforms to talk about the imperative mission of DevOps to combine efficiency, speed and security. With emphasis on empowering teams to fail fast, moving security to the left, and a deep dive into Platform 1, you won't want to miss this episode!

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:27] DevSecOps’ Speed of the Mission
• [09:02] The Cultural Shift That Needs to Occur to Upgrade the Speed of the Mission
• [19:21] The Future of DevOps

Episode Links and Resources

• Bob Stevens
• Platform 1
• Dateline Podcast
• Alex Cross Series
• John Wick

DevSecOps’ Speed of the Mission

Carolyn: This week Bob Stevens, Area Vice President of Public Sector at GitLab is joining me. Bob is a seasoned veteran in public sector technology with over 25 years of experience. As the AVP at GitLab, he is responsible for helping government organizations become more productive, efficient, and effective.

Bob also has experience on both the industry and the government side of things. Prior to industry he served in the United States Air Force as a computer specialist at the White House Communications Agency. I am excited today to dive in and talk about the ways that we can use DevOps to modernize and secure government IT, and what the outlook for DevOps is. How are you doing, Bob?

Bob: I'm doing great. The weather's getting better in DC, so it's good to see the sun from time to time versus what we've had. But yes, doing fantastic.

Carolyn: Well, good to hear it. So let's just dive in. And let's walk through what DevOps is and why implementing these practices is critical to helping modernize and improve government IT?

Bob: Great. So I guess DevOps is combining efficiency, speed, and security all into one. And creating software at what I like to refer to as the speed of the mission for the government. The business side is a little different. But for the government, it's all about the mission and you being able to accomplish the mission faster and stay ahead of our adversaries. In the case of DoD and on the civilian side, it’s to ensure that all of the citizens that any given agency supports gets the best possible support that they can. If you look at the organizations like the Veterans Administration. You can imagine they've got a lot of applications that they've written.

The Platform the Government Is Looking For to Improve the Speed of the Mission

Bob: To help the vets accomplish what they need to accomplish in a timely manner. So DevOps really will help them to produce the software at speed, more securely, more efficiently, and provide the most or the best service that they possibly can to all of the veterans out there, just as one example.

Carolyn: So, you know Tech Transforms is vendor agnostic. And I would love for you to just take a couple of minutes and talk about how GitLab helps with that. And just what GitLab does. I've read the marketing statements and it's a little nebulous for me. I would love to have you explain what GitLab does and how it's helping agencies achieve this?

Bob: I appreciate that you're letting me do this in a vendor-agnostic community. I mean, there are a lot of tools that are required to produce software. But the way that the industry or the government in particular is heading, and you can see this in some of the articles that DoD has recently released. Is they're looking for one platform that encompasses the entire software development life cycle.

As you can imagine right now, I know agencies that have anywhere from 14 to 20 different tools that they're using. And the issue with that is that there's developers that like the tool that they like. So they bring their own and they develop their portion of the software. Unfortunately, when it all comes together, it doesn't always work because they've used different tools across the development organization.

And so, with the use of a single platform, you can ensure that at the end, everything is going to work. The nice thing is you can continue to bring some of those other tools. Because they integrate with the platform.

Speed of the Mission and Security Collide

Bob: Just as an example, JIRA, the government's using a lot of JIRA. And JIRA integrates with GitLab so that you can use them seamlessly together. So the developers that are using their favorite tools can continue to use some of those. It's just that it's going to be more efficient because in the end you're going to have an application that works out of the box.

Also what GitLab is trying to address is moving security to the left. Developers are a lot of times at odds with security folks because developers are tasked with developing code fast. They want to get it done quickly. And security folks want it to be done secure. So sometimes the two collide.

But when you're building a single platform and you allow, or you have the ability to move security to the left, which means, when I check in a line of code, I'm going to do a security scan to make sure that I didn't somehow introduce a vulnerability. If I did, I could fix it immediately rather than waiting until the end of the process. Then running security scans and realizing, I may have to go back through hundreds of lines or thousands of lines of code to figure out where that vulnerability was introduced and do the repair.

The other thing that I'll tell you is visibility. Not everyone has to be a developer to use the platform or GitLab. You can be in the executive branch and know nothing about how to write code. But you can see the process during the whole time. You can ensure that what's being produced is going to best meet the requirements of the people that it's being produced for. You don't have to wait till the end to produce the app.

The Very Important Role of the CIO and CISO in the Speed of the Mission

Bob: The users start using it. And they're like, "Oh my God, this is not the way that I wanted this to work." Or, "This doesn't work for me." Or, "It would've been nice to do this." It can be integrated during the process so that you can make sure that the application is usable in the end.

Carolyn: What you just said helps me understand what GitLab does a lot more than any reading I was going to do on my own. And it certainly sounds like a smarter way to do things. So you've written many articles and often you talk about the need for DevOps, DevSecOps, a big part of it is just cultural. And so is that starting at the CIO level? And if so, what are CIOs doing right now?

Bob: I mean, first of all, I have empathy for CIOs because they have so much thrown at them right now. It's incredible. I actually don't know how they are able to get as much done as they do. But having said that, I think most CIOs know that they need to move away from the legacy development waterfall to the agile software development world. And I think they're making gains towards that.

Bob: Nothing in the government moves quickly, but moving to agile, it does require a cultural shift. And that's where the CIO or the CISO plays a very important role because they've got to convince the organization that failure is okay.

Because when you fast fail, you actually make more progress than waiting till the end. Which is a cultural shift for any organization. That shift has to start at the CIO level. It can't start at the lower levels.

The Cultural Shift That Needs to Occur to Upgrade the Speed of the Mission

Bob: The lower levels have got to be empowered to fast fail to experiment in order to produce the best possible software application that they can.

Carolyn: So you talk about this in an article that I just read Modernizing and securing government IT through DevOps. You say that, "Federal CIOs embarking on a DevOps journey should embrace continuous integration, continuous delivery pipelines to reduce toolchain complexity, management, and maintenance." What can CIOs and CISOs do to embrace that statement? Because that's like you said, that's a lot.

Bob: It is, yes. And unfortunately they have many more mandates coming at them from OMB and NIST. Even though NIST doesn't generally put out mandates, more guidance. But they're starting to come forward with a few more mandates. And so I don't know how they're keeping up with it. They're doing the best that they can. But it's the cultural shift that needs to occur for the development life cycle. It's also the building of the platform.

I say this often, it's not really the money. And I think that CIOs can find money to buy tools. I think it is more of the resources and the cultural shift that needs to occur. And that's where the CIO can really have the influence, is to be able to provide the resources, be able to have the backing at that level for experimentation and fast failure. And it's not necessarily because they can get the Technology Modernization Fund. I mean, upgrading your DevOps world is modernization, so they can tap into funds. It's really the other things that need to be considered for the shift to the new DevOps environment.

How Platform 1 Helped in the Speed of the Mission

Carolyn: Do you have any good use cases or stories that you can talk about where you've seen this shift happen and this DevOps, this new process, this agile process be implemented?

Bob: Yes, sure. I'm going to go back to my Air Force roots, which makes me proud. The building of Platform 1 was a huge shift. And as a result, the Air Force is able to produce software so much faster than they were. And when they produced the applications in the end, they're closer to what the user needs in order to do their job. Because who better to inform the developer about what's required than the person that's going to use the application.

As an example, you can imagine there's a lot of software in the F-35, just tons of software. So who's the best person to tell the app developer what they need for flying that jet? It's the pilot. So if they can participate in the DevOps process and they can, in the way that things are designed in Platform One, then it's going to be a more efficient use.

Carolyn: Okay. You just said something about Platform One that made some light bulbs go off. That term gets thrown around a lot. I use it a lot. I didn't understand that the end-user was involved that way.

Bob: Oh yes. I mean, that's the beauty of building a platform or using a tool like GitLab. They have the visibility, they can see the software as it's being developed and can have input.

Carolyn: And they do participate? They'll look at it and say, "No, that's not going to work?"

End-Users’ Participation in Improving the Speed of the Mission

Bob: Sure. Yes, absolutely. And that's how you can take the use of an application from months or a year down to weeks or days. The modification of a software package could be done in hours versus the way that it was done in the past. So it's just a lot more efficient way to be able to produce a usable application in the end.

Carolyn: Okay. My mind's still spinning on this end-user can say, "No, that's not going to work." So for them to participate, are they actually using the end result somehow? So they use it the way they would really use it in the field, like through a simulator or something so they can test it kind of real life? And then, I mean, how does the pilot test and give feedback?

Bob: Yes. Well, a couple of ways. First of all, they have the visibility, they see the code being written. Although they don't necessarily need to understand what each line is, or how to write it.

Carolyn: Right. Well, because I would think the pilots, that wouldn't mean anything to them.

Bob: Yes. Like you said, they can see the simulation, but they can also see or respond to questions from the developer. They can see what the developer is thinking in regard to what they're producing. So all that's valuable information for them to be able to provide feedback. So again, in the end, the application works as expected and meets the requirement and the mission. It's all about the mission.

Carolyn: But spending time answering questions in a chat room about something developers doing. Is that part of their job description? Like every hour or every day they spend an hour responding to developers? How does that work?

Guideaux

Bob: Probably not, a little short story for you. Several years ago, I was in a meeting where a very high-level person in the Air Force said every airman will be a developer. And I thought they were crazy, absolutely crazy. But by producing a platform that allows them to participate, not necessarily write code, but participate, they can all be developers in a manner of speaking.

So I think that the Air Force has been able to come as close to accomplishing that as you possibly can. Which of course, again makes me proud. That's not to say the other branches aren't doing the same thing, they are. It's just, the Air Force was out in front of the other branches.

Carolyn: Yes. I have a whole new respect for Platform One now. I really did not understand that everybody was participating like that.

Bob: And yes. I have to point out Top Gun is the Navy, not the Air Force.

Carolyn: Thank you. Well, so in the same article that I referenced earlier, back to Air Force, you talk about Master Sergeant James Crocker. I don't know if you want to share his handle?

Bob: He goes by Guideaux.

Carolyn: Yes. His story and some of the stats that you shared with his story were pretty beyond impressive. I mean, they're almost like you say, that a hundred years of program time and software release timelines were reduced. You went from three to eight months for that cycle to just one week.

Bob: Yes. I mean, it's a great story, and he's built a great software factory. And he continues to run it today. He is a strong, strong advocate for a DevOps platform. And he's proven that it'll work. He continues to do that every day.

How Failure Was Embraced to Boost the Speed of the Mission

Bob: And again, he established the bar for speed to mission, and what they've been able to do there. We're going to continue to support him and get him whatever he needs to be able to help produce the applications the way that they have been for a few years now.

Carolyn: I want to revisit what you said about a culture of failing fast. Was he a leader in that? Because to me, that's not something that gets advertised about any of our defense agencies. That you would brag that yes, we fail all the time. That's part of our goal. That's part of our objective. So, if he was one of the first to embrace that, or how does that get embraced? I would imagine it's still resisted a lot to fail.

Bob: Well, I mean, yes. I mean, especially in the U.S., the word failure is bad. But it's how we learn and it's how we move forward rapidly. I'm in sales. I'm chartered with selling to the government.

And I'm always telling the team whenever they're involved in an opportunity is like, fast fail. If it's not really an opportunity, then move on, because you're going to waste your time. And frankly, you're wasting the government's time. So stop wasting their time.

So, it is a big shift. But like I said, Guideaux's definitely one of the people in the military, the Air Force that embraced it. He also had support from executives, which is required across the Air Force. It is a great story and I'm glad it's public so that I can talk about it.

The Future of DevOps

Carolyn: Yes, me too. So what do you think the future of DevOps looks like?

Bob: It gets back to the building of the platform. Where all tools are integrated and there's no more BYOT.

Carolyn: Device. I knew you weren't saying BYOB. Although, maybe we should.

Bob: It's really getting the teams to collaborate. Here's another great example of what the Air Force has done. They've put software factories in downtown, in cities, Austin, Salt Lake, many others, where they can find and retain top talent. This, I think is genius.

And they've given them an environment that they enjoy working in. I mean, honestly, some of the bases they're old, the buildings are old, nobody wants to go to them. But, if you can go to this nice fancy office in downtown Salt Lake City, then you're going to be a much happier person and more likely to show up and be productive. So, I think that's another thing that DoD has embraced is where they're building the factories, and the talent that they're able to attract and retain as a result of that.

Carolyn: Do they allow remote work in these software factories or does it all have to be on-prem?

Bob: No, they do. And that's another great thing to point out. Three years ago, if you said to me that the DoD was going to allow people to work at home, I'd say you were crazy. It's never going to happen. But the pandemic forced the issue. And now DoD has embraced it. I think that what they've found is that folks are perhaps more productive than having to commute and being in an office. A lot of good positive lessons learned as a result of remote work. I think that it's going to continue.

GitLab Is a Hundred Percent Remote

Bob: I don't know if you know this, but GitLab is a hundred percent remote.

Carolyn: How long? Is that just because of the pandemic or has that been a while now?

Bob: No, it's pretty much since inception. We did have an office for a few short months, which was closed. And I think that was about six or seven years ago now. So, we're quite proud of being an all-remote company, and the way that we've made that work.

There's been a lot of papers written on it. There's a lot of great information on our website that can help organizations understand what it takes to be an all-remote company. But one of the strong benefits from it is, if I'm looking for somebody with development skills, they can be anywhere in the world.

Carolyn: Exactly. You open up your talent pool just exponentially. And I've worked remote for 10 years and I've had to jump through the hoops and every year, fill out the paperwork. I've worked in government supporting the government mission for over a decade. It was a battle until the last two years. And now it's, everybody gets it.

But it's interesting because there's this movement right now to get people back into the office. And I'm just wondering what that's going to do to talent retention? If somebody had told me I had to go back into the office, I don't think I would do it, Bob.

Bob: Well, I think there's a negotiation that's occurring now, based on what I'm hearing with the companies that are trying to reestablish the office. There's a lot of pushback from the employees. And it's tough enough to get talent today. You don't want to create any other barriers.

What Bob...

Mike Maciag, Chief Marketing Officer at Dynatrace joins Tech Transforms to talk about the power of observability. Careful monitoring is of paramount importance for any successful operation, and observability can take your agency to the next level. Listen in as Carolyn and Mark get some tips and tricks for improving cybersecurity posture with the most accurate technology.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:31] The Vital Role That Observability Plays in IT
• [10:40] Observability: When You’re Asking the Systems to Share
• [22:48] The President’s Memo on User Experience
• [34:01] Let Machines Do the Stuff That Doesn’t Matter

Episode Links and Resources

• Mike Maciag
• Dynatrace
• American Moon Shot

The Vital Role That Observability Plays in IT

Carolyn: Today, we get to welcome Mike Maciag, who is Chief Marketing Officer of Dynatrace. One of our own, one of the clan is here with us today. And as CMO, Mike is responsible for Dynatrace's global marketing organization. We're really excited to hear his expert opinion on observability and the vital role that it plays in IT, and especially the cloud.

Mike: Thank you, Carolyn. Mark, nice to be with you both today. And I know this is a long time in coming, but I'm excited to be sitting down and talking to you today.

Carolyn: We've been able to talk to a few of our guests a little bit about APM. And just recently we talked to a former CIO at VA. He is very bullish on APM, and he talked a lot about the advances that they were able to make in the VA with APM. Just that at least within the VA, APM moved from a nice to have to a must-have. And what I'd really like to hear you talk about, just to dive right in, Mike, is so there's the APM part. But then in my mind and I might be positioning this wrong. In my mind, I think that observability is like APM 2.0. But can you speak to that APM versus observability? What's the difference?

Mike: As long as we're talking about terms, we might want to mix monitoring in there as well. All terms that are thrown around, is it monitoring, is it APM, is it observability? And it's changed, it's changed a lot. Let me start with the simplest definition, then maybe we can unpack it from there. Think of observability as the umbrella term, as the broadest umbrella term that goes above all of this.

Monitoring, APM, ObservabilityMike: Observability fully includes APM, and observability also subsumes monitoring, both of the things that we've been doing. There are kind of two megatrends in the industry that have been driving this move towards observability. One is the move to the cloud.

More and more systems are moving to cloud architectures, probably more important digitally native architectures. We're going from monolithic systems that we could understand, that we could see, that we could touch. We could understand what's happening with them into cloud increasingly complex, even multi-cloud architectures that are driven by microservices and the like.

The reason for that movement is it has made digital transformation, application development faster and easier in that regard. Which is this digital transformation fundamentally looking at everything that I've been doing in every aspects of my business. Whether it be on the front end or in the services I provide. Whether it be on the front end or in the backend machine to machine conversations is happening in cloud architectures. And we're trying to figure out how we can automate more of it and things are happening that way.

Does that make sense, just from a starting point, from observability’s umbrella, fully subsumed monitoring, fully subsumed APM, kind of in that the drivers being cloud and digital transformation making that happen. And I can get into more details.

Mark: That absolutely hits the mark. And we also say end-user performance or experience.

Mike: That's right.

Carolyn: Yes, that sets me straight. Because me saying that observability is APM 2.0 is wrong. APM, like you said, it's underneath observability. It might be, I guess, one way into implementing an observability platform into your organization, but it's not all of it.

Where the User Touches the Applications

Mike: Yes. When you say observability, kind of what pops into my mind is thinking through there's APM, there is infrastructure monitoring as part of that, what's going on in the infrastructure that's underneath it. There's, as Mark was kind of alluding to, digital experience management. Where does the end-user fit into this? And kind of making that happen.

Then you have increasingly even elements of systems that are achieving what they need to achieve have security in there as well. Because really, we think about a world where software works perfectly. The expectation is that we live in a world where software works perfectly. Now, that's a vision. It's a long way coming. But to make that happen on an end-to-end basis, you really need to bring all of those things in there.

APM, I often think about as the high ground in this, because APM is where the user touches the applications. It's where the business needs meet the IT needs of what's happening. And it's kind of what people can touch in that area. It's a very interesting place to enter. That obviously is an important part of it. But it's absolutely essential to have the infrastructure that's monitored underneath it and the user experience. At least specifically as you may kind of thought.

Mark: You mentioned a couple of different things. And in the federal market, there's two things. And if we have time, maybe we can talk about these. But one is the executive order that the president came out with at the end of the calendar year around end-user experience. It was something very new that we had seen coming out of the government. So maybe we can talk about that maybe a little bit later if we had time.

Infrastructure Monitoring Is Observability

Mark: But the second one, and you mentioned security, was zero-trust. The whole cybersecurity, and of course everybody's trying to figure out ways that they can improve their security posture. And people like Carolyn and I figure out how we can tap into the cybersecurity budgets that have been allocated to that.

Carolyn: Well, okay, for our listeners, I want to back up just a little bit and define APM. It's application performance monitoring. You made me realize that we didn't define that, Mike. Because when you said there's the infrastructure monitoring too. You're right, in my mind, application performance monitoring includes infrastructure monitoring, but not necessarily. That would be the observability.

Mike: Yes. Carolyn, just to not get too inside baseball and Dynatrace, I understand why you think about it that way. Because our APM does in fact include. We think of APM as full-stack. It goes all the way down to the infrastructure that it's monitoring. When people work with Dynatrace, they're getting that as part of included. So absolutely makes sense why you kind of giving your steeping of Dynatrace kind of thinks of it that way. The rest of the world does not, by the way.

They think of APM and infrastructure as two different things. You basically buy those off cardless. We don't think they can be separated. Because what you want to be able to do, I mean, the goal here is to simplify cloud complexity to the point where you can get a precise root cause answer if something were to go wrong. And drill all the way down to, "Here's a specific line of code that's making that happen." Or, "Here's the piece of infrastructure that's making that happen."

How Can We Better Position the Concepts of Observability and Federal

Mike: Let's say it's in a Kubernetes environment, just a container that spun down in a second. But it does that 60 times an hour, you need to be able to find that as it comes and goes. That's why you need to have full-stack as you kind of think about that.

Mark: You said some interesting things there, Mike, and I want to dig into this a little bit deeper. Because in the federal space, we feel like we're three to five years behind the commercial market. And the use of these concepts of observability, even APM, we rarely see RFPs coming out that have APM listed in it.

We might see infrastructure monitoring, we might see other terminology like that, but we rarely see these concepts. And the government has been in this transformation for years, moving to the cloud. Some agencies have had more success than others. Can we talk a little bit about how we might be able to better position the concepts and terminology of observability and federal better?

Mike: You mentioned three to five years behind, debatable exactly how many years. But the curve that the commercial space has gone through increasingly seems to be exactly the curve that the federal space is on. Which is with the moves towards moving to the cloud, whether they be trusted clouds or public clouds. The same kind of breakup of monolithic architectures has taken place.

When you break up the monolithic architectures, speed and scalability come with that, and flexibility come with that. And the other truth that I think you'll run into is complexity also comes with that. Guess what, no one, and I'm guessing the federal government is the same, is getting additional resources to monitor this in the old way.Observability: When You’re Asking the Systems to Share

Mike: The idea that a system should be able to be monitored. You can understand whether the system is up or down and they go figure it out from their monitoring health.

When you move into observability, what you're doing is you're asking the systems themselves to share, to become observable, to put out data that says, "Hey, here's what's going on with me". And so that it can begin to understand in that way.

That's the purpose of trying to simplify that complexity. So that when you don't have greater resources to get your jobs done, you can still stay on top of it. The last thing that people want to do is get bogged down in monitoring and not be able to innovate. And be able to drive those new apps that are driving better services for citizens that are driving more security in DoD-oriented areas, et cetera. That's where this idea of observability is.

I'll even go one step further than that. Observability today does not include the concepts of intelligence and automation, but we think it should. And that's because this overwhelming amount of data that's being generated by these systems is really beyond the capability to the old ways. Where I'm going to put some data up on dashboards.

I can look at the dashboards and figure out what's going on and have a good sense of what's going on. It's just not possible to stay on top of it that way. We think about it as moving to a world where we're providing answers. The answers are allowing people to automate more and get more out of their teams.

Mark: Well, that's a good answer.

What the World Is Lacking in Terms of Security

Mark: We'll get that out to the sales team right away. One of the things that you mentioned that we run into is security. Some of the customers that we have, have a very different or stringent, higher stringent security requirements than others. Obviously, as you can imagine. That's maybe a level of complexity we run into. It's certainly an issue. We see that come out a lot. Is that the same kind of answer that we would provide about security?

Mike: Yes. One of the things that we're seeing more and more of kind of in the security sphere is how do you think about security in real-time and finding precisely identifying security issues in production? We have all kinds of things in the world that try and keep the bad guys out, or the bad actors, or the bad code out. We have even more things in the world that test, and says, "Okay. Before I do a check-in, kind of do a static code analysis on this and understand whether it's got known vulnerabilities in it."

What the world has been lacking has been the idea of, "Okay, so now there's something out there. How do I know who has it, or what systems have it, and how do I precisely identify it and make it happen?" Log4Shell helped us see this kind of in very specific ways, later not as large of an issue. But Log4Shell showed the same thing. Which is all of a sudden there was a zero-day exploit that was out there. Or it was a zero-day exploit that was discovered in a very popular open-source package that could be manipulated. In the entire world, they find it and fix it overnight.

Identifying Vulnerability Through Observability

Mike: By providing observability on the whole stack and understanding where it existed, our customers at Dynatrace were able to find that instantaneously. The minute it was identified as a vulnerability, we could show specifically what was going on and at least helped people with the, "How am I going to get to the point where I know exactly what happened and I can close that door as fast as I possibly can?"

Now, as we move on, it gets to, "Okay, great. Now let's move it into, 'I'm going to take automatic action and do a remediation on that.'" And there's more and more of that going on. But security is playing an increasingly large role in this. We should really be talking about DevSecOps teams to correct myself, are increasingly expected to build security into the applications and in the infrastructure, and setting up and ensure through things like what we're doing.

Carolyn: How do you see observability fitting into DevSecOps?

Mike: It's an absolutely essential piece of it, and here's why. DevSecOps, just in the broadest, most simple terms is the idea that responsibility for all of this shifts left. When I say shift left, it used to be we'd write monolithic code, we'd throw it over the wall. The people would operate the code on the other side of it. And there'd be this finger-pointing game of, "It didn't work well. What I gave you worked. Your system must be messed up," et cetera.

The DevSecOps at the broadest sense is let's shift that responsibility left and give development the responsibility to build operability into reliability, resiliency into the product, as well as building the security of the product from the beginning. How Observability Fit Into DevSecOps

Mike: To make that happen, you need to provide the instrumentation so that they know what's happening in production. Or what would happen in production when I put it in production.

Then if I can provide precise root cause and get it to the next level of like, "Not only did this go wrong, or could it go wrong, or there was a slowdown, but here's specifically why," I can go fix it faster. I want to be able to make this happen. And really the purpose behind all of this is the world wants and expects flawless and secure interactions. Whether that's a machine to a person or whether that's a machine to a machine, you expect it to be flawless.

That's a fair expectation. And as we go more and more digital with the world, and that's kind of the whole idea of digital transformation. That's why we expect this flawless result. In the commercial sector, it may be in many ways more forgiving than elements of the federal sector, where you guys are talking in your audience sense.

The idea of having something go wrong or making a wrong assumption in software that the interaction doesn't go right can be immense. It hits not hundreds, not thousands of users, but tens of thousands to millions, to hundreds of millions of citizens.

Mark: Well, it could be life dependent. I mean, and the DoD in the IC space where mission criticality means the life or death, it couldn't get any more gray than that.

Making Decisions With Precise Accuracy Is Required

Mike: Yes, that's absolutely right. A big part of this then is all of this data that these modern systems are putting out, it's like, okay, how do you take that data and you turn it into an answer so that you know specifically what's happening? And then once I have, if I can get my answers precise enough, how do I then automate based on that? So that I can get to a point of being able to automate as things go on?

Mark, to kind of go on your life and death scenario, it's like sometimes I talk about this from a self-driving car's perspective. Which is it's a car needs to observe everything that's going on in its environment in real-time to kind of make it happen. What's it like outside, what's the speed limit, where am I on the road? Are there other issues to deal with? But then it needs to make decisions, and it needs to make decisions with precise accuracy.

In order to automate, you need to be able to make decisions with precise accuracy. You can't approach a crosswalk in a self-driving car if that day ever comes, and be unsure whether it's a shadow or a pedestrian. You just can't and you need to get down to that.

It's no different than IT, and it's no different in the observability space. Which is if you're going to automate remediation and allow people to innovate, that's going to have to happen with very precise root cause and a positive AI that's kind of underneath it and those types of things.

Mark: Well, that's a great example of that, kind of putting in it context so everybody can understand.

Monitoring Versus Observability

Mark: Carolyn, if it's okay with you, I know that Mike started tapping into this whole DevSecOps concept and I wanted to ask a question about that. Maybe you could peel in and back a little bit further, Mike. And so in a recent article by Dark Reading, you stated that today's rapid pace of innovation coupled with the complexity of modern software development has elevated the need for automated orchestration.

Mike: Yes.

Mark: Can you talk a little bit about this and how do you see this changing for us?

Mike: Yes. I remember the entire context of the article. But I certainly kind of understand the subject and kind of what we're talking about that way. This complexity curve is not going to stop. As we go from monolithic architectures to cloud architectures. As we go to containers and microservices, as we go to multi-cloud, as we go to huge scale. These systems, we go to change that just does not stop. It's kind of a constant change.

These systems are all generating immense amounts of data. Both in the variety that they're generating, the volume that they're generating in the speed at which they're doing it. Basically what it says is things have to change in the way that you manage your systems.

We started at the top of this as monitoring versus observability. That's a good example of we just need to think, kind of change our mindsets as we're going to go through that. You have to change the way that the teams work as well. And that is getting the teams from reactive, "Hey, I've got a problem. How do I go fix it?"

Observability Data

Mike: To proactive looking and observability data, and anticipating what problems are going to come up and how do I address them before they impact end-users. Otherwise, people would just be completely buried and there'll be...

Richard Ford, Chief Technology Officer at Praetorian joins Tech Transforms to talk about the cyber security threat landscape. Red team versus Blue team is a common and effective threat protection practice, but what could cyber security experts gain from team Purple? Listen in as Carolyn and Mark learn about the importance of managing your attack surface, implementing multi-factor authentication, and protecting against cyber phishing attacks.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:30] Our Biggest Cybersecurity Threat in the Last Quarter
• [07:39] Which Is Easier: Defense or Offense
• [16:40] Why Do We Need Single Sign-on
• [24:54] The Team Purple Idea

Episode Links and Resources

• Richard Ford
• Praetorian
• The Clothes in the Wardrobe
• Sauces and Shapes
• Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
• Game Changer

Our Biggest Cybersecurity Threat in the Last Quarter

Carolyn: So today our guest is actually an old friend, Richard Ford, who is Chief Technology Officer at Praetorian. For over 25 years, Richard has been able to design and implement NextGen product strategies and provide customers with the best threat detection available. Today, we're going to talk to Richard about the cyber threat landscape and what a good defense looks like.

Richard: Hi, it's nice to be back on a call with you Carolyn, and Mark, it's good to see you.

Carolyn: Yes, really good to have you today. So let's just jump right in. I want to know what your view is, what are our biggest cybersecurity threats? What does the cyber security threat landscape look like and how do we defend ourselves from it? So there's like three-part question there.

Richard: So, we're starting with an easy question. I think the threat landscape is incredibly messy and I think that the most important part to think about is change. So if you think about just the last quarter or two that we've gone through you had, like log4shell someone we're all running around looking for log4j vulnerabilities. Then it's Spring4Shell, which wasn't as serious, but was still pretty nasty if you were impacted.

The problem, we have this tremendous rate of change so the thing that was important to you yesterday may not be the thing that's important to you today. It's unlikely to be the thing that's most important for you tomorrow. So when we think about the threat landscape, the first thing to say is, if I give you an answer, it's like looking at a single, still image from a movie and telling you've watched the movie, right?Cyber Security Threat Landscape

Richard: Then as soon as we go click, you know that threat landscape will change. With that said, I do think there are some common themes that keep coming back, right? So there's a threat we have around being desperately short of people. There's a threat around, we don't know what assets we have. Even if we did know what assets we have, we don't know what they're running.

Then the business conditions are driving us forward so quickly that it's difficult to keep security on the front burner. It sometimes drops to the back burner so we don't think about security as much. Perhaps, as how do I meet these business objectives that we have. I think this has created this sort of very unpleasant, perfect storm that will keep us well on our toes. I don't know, for the next couple of decades, it feels like.

Carolyn: So when you say that we're constantly moving forward, changing, at the same time, I mean, are we still dealing with like SolarWinds? So as we're having to look to the future, we're still dealing with all the shit that's happened even a year, two years ago. Is that true, or like, are we good? We took care of it?

Richard: No, it's definitely correct right, so all vulnerabilities never really go away. So you have all those things sort of trailing behind you like the comet has a tail, and new stuff coming at you.

I think to be a successful CISO or to operate the business successfully, what you need to be really good at is prioritization. So it's about dealing with what is the biggest risk for you right now. Cyber Threat Landscape Varies Depending on Who You Are and What You Do

Richard: And I think that leads us to a very important point that we talk about cyber threat landscape. But it's different depending on who you are and what you do. So the biggest risk, for example, for government might be very different than critical infrastructure, might be very different for sort of mom and pop SME that's sort of operating the corner store. Each one of these has a different threat landscape that they live in, different risks and different risks to the business.

Not only that, but yes, this is all additive. So we still see scams for all vulnerabilities as we look at our threat intel. I remember going back a few years, there were viruses that used to trigger on certain days of the month or certain months of the year. For years afterwards, you would see these viruses fire up and start scanning things. Which means that there were still people out there who were still infected, which is just stunning to me.

Carolyn: Ah, the good old days when we knew the day that it was going to happen, the day of the month it was going to happen.

Richard: Yes exactly. I still remember the old Michelangelo virus, right? When it was like a trigger day was coming and everyone was counting down to what would happen on Michelangelo day. But I guess that just shows my age or perhaps the more positive spin is my longevity in the industry.

Carolyn: Your experience.

How Richard’s Experience on the Offensive Side Affected His Approach to the Defensive Cybersecurity Landscape

Mark: So speaking of experience, Richard, you have an interesting background. Because you have experience in both the offensive cybersecurity landscape and the defensive cybersecurity landscape. So can you talk a little bit about how your experience working on the offensive side has impacted or affected your approach to the defensive cybersecurity landscape?

Richard: Yes, so I think the offensive and defensive sides that are so intimately related, it's like thinking about two sides of a piece of paper. They're really one, you can't peel one side off a piece of paper, at least not very effectively.

So I think that to play a good defense, you have to have mastered offense.

I think we were chatting earlier, as we thought this through and we were talking about chess. It would be like me saying I was a chess master, but I can only play the white side of the board. I'm not very good at playing black or I'm a master at black. I'm not really very good with my white opening systems.

You have to be good at both to really be rounded out. I use chess as an analogy because it's an adversarial game and that's exactly the sort of wrestling around we do in the attacker space. So I don't think you can truly be good at defense without understanding the ways of the attacker.

I don't think you can be a great attacker without having a good understanding of the pain that your attacks cause to defenders. Because there are things I can do as the attacker that make certain defenses untenable, even if they're effective. In the sense that they stop me from getting in, but I can make it so it's really hard to use. Maybe I make it noisy for you.Which Is Easier: Defense or Offense

Mark: Well, is it easier to play offense or is it easier to play defense?

Richard: Oh, that's definitely an easy question. Yes. So I'll say that I've never really lost playing offense. I'm sad to say that playing defender is much harder and we can talk about why, but it's definitely easier to be on the offensive side.

Carolyn: Let's talk about why.

Richard: Well, I mean, step one, it's more fun, right? Who doesn't like going on the offense. It's that adrenaline rush when you sort of manage to get your exploit past some of these defenses. But I think the other thing is that if you're a business, you have this very large attack surface, right? And all of it has to be secure and it has to be secure all the time.

So if you think about a pen test, a pen test might tell you that your attack surface at 7:55 PM on a Tuesday in April is perfect right? Can't get it. But an administrator spins up a box for testing or you miss patching something because a new vulnerability came out at 8:00 PM and suddenly you're vulnerable again.

So as an attacker, I'm pretty good at finding vulnerabilities today. But if I don't find a vulnerability today and it gets me into your system. I'll wait till tomorrow and I'll nail your system tomorrow. You have to be good 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. I have to be good once and I can just wait for you to slip up.

Mark: Do you guys do this in your current role? Do you play these games? You know, red team, blue team kind of thing?

We Are Not Taking Advantage of Team Purple

Richard: Yes, we absolutely do. Praetorian is a company, it’s a mix of product offering and services offerings. Our services offerings, we absolutely do red and blue teaming with some pretty large customers. One of the things that people don't take advantage of enough is a purple team, right? Which makes it less adversarial. So the thing with the red team is we're coming in, we're going to root your network. That's fun and there is value for the customer. But it's very adversarial. You're trying to catch me, I'm trying to wear.

What's really fun is a purple team where we're working on both sides of the line. We're working with the blue team to see if we can see it. And we're working as a red team to see if we can get it and that's a little bit more of a collaborative game.

So there's a lot of opportunity for knowledge transfer and learning to our customers. It's not just about, can we get in? Because we pretty much always do, it's about did you see it? And how can you improve your defenses so that when you're breached that way next time, you do better?

I think purple teams are actually underutilized in the industry. They do move away from this adversarial game to more of a collaborative game. I think they're more fun in some ways, too, and they have better business value.

Carolyn: Would you say that the purple team is where your own employees would fall? Like you've got your unintentional insider. You've got your admin that spins up some server that you didn't even know was coming and creates this vulnerability. So is that like, just as you're describing, I haven't heard the term purple team.

Do Employees Fall Under Team Purple?

Carolyn: But as you were talking about it, it made me think that's where we live as employees. Is that a fair statement?

Richard: Kind of. I mean, I think there's a lot of unintentional harm that we do as employees. A lot of well-intentioned moves lead to security risks. But a purple team is sort of when you blend, obviously, from the name. A red team where you've got a group of people who's trying to get in. Blue team, a group of people who's trying to stop you from getting in where you blend those. So it's more about, did you see the attack? It's about improving the defenses and the resilience of the system. As much as it is about breaching the system.

Mark: So, Richard, you've seen this kind of play out across government agencies and commercial industry. Who's better at it? Commercial or government?

Richard: So I think it's really hard to lump any large group of people into buckets, right?

Mark: He just went right down the middle. He went purple.

Richard: Yes. I mean, I think they have very different challenges for a start, right? But I think businesses range from really very, very good to really very, very bad . There are some targets that come across our radar when we're on the offensive side of the world where we're like, oh, that's a really hard target. These folks really know their onions, they really know what they're doing. We're going to have to pull out our A-game to find a win. There are other companies where it's like shooting fish in a barrel where the barrel is big and only contains fish.

Who’s Better in Playing Team Purple, Government or Commercial

Richard: Now the government is different. The government, especially when we're talking about the federal government, it's shocking to say this, it's a little bit more organized. Because there are certain standards that they're required to adhere to. So there's more sort of governance.

Now, there are still different levels within the government and especially when you get into state government and sort of governmental agencies that have complicated missions, NASA would be a good one if we want to chat about that because they have some very interesting mission requirements.

But I'd say, in some ways, the government is a little bit more homogenous than the top end. Some of our intelligence agencies, they have pretty solid security. The fact that you can legislate and you can enforce does make some of that a little bit easier. The flip side is that it's very difficult for the government to compete on salary with a top salary in an industry. So there's a sort of constant sucking sound from the business side of the house pulling top talent away from the government. So they definitely have challenges around staffing.

Mark: Well, you talked about staffing, this is the, like the second time you brought up people. As a challenge, can you talk a little bit about that? What you've seen, how maybe it can be addressed or how you've done that in the past?

Richard: Let's define the problem. Cybersecurity people are really expensive and they're hard to come by and they're hard to retain. If I was a mercenary, I could flip my job every 12 months and probably have a very nice raise sort of built into my paycheck and that's a problem.

What the Industry Can Do to Win as Defenders

Richard: There are only two ways to solve for that. You either need to get more people or you need to use technology to get better productivity out of the people that you have. The right thing to do of course, is both. You need to take that sort of left-hand and that right-hand approach. I think there's some interesting things that we can do in both that will dramatically improve the outcomes that we have as an industry.

Carolyn: Going back to being a defender. You know me, Richard, I like you to just tell me like how we fix this. So give me the McDonald's version, like top three things that government, industry can do for some quick wins as defenders.

Richard: So I think that it all starts the really honest assessment of where you are in your maturity. So there's no one size fits all. Especially in the business world, there are small companies who don't have endpoint protection. Or they're not following anything that's remotely like best practice with understanding even where they are. They haven't even asked the question of what is my cyber maturity?

So I think all these discussions start with a good measure of where are you on that curve because where you are defines what you should do. With that said, I think that most businesses get breached because of software rot. That's something that's hanging out there and it's unpatched and you don't even know you have it.

So managing your attack surface is incredibly important. I think moving to things like single sign-on and multifactor is incredibly important. And I think having a robust set of defenses around phishing, which is the sort of easiest, common way here.

Why Do We Need Single Sign-on

Carolyn: Still number one way, right?

Richard: Yes.

Carolyn: Like still today. It is the number one way.

Richard: Yes. I mean, because people are people and computers can be quite difficult to break. But getting somebody to send me 500 Steam gift cards because I texted them can be quite easy, right? Especially if you take your time in target selection. From a mathematical standpoint, if you think about it like a game, there's no cost of predation. If I text every one of your employees say, "Hey, this is Nathan, the CEO, can you call me back? I want you to buy some gift cards for surprise for accounting" and boy will accounting be surprised. You know, all it takes is one person to go, "Oh, it's the CEO. I'm so excited about that."

Carolyn: Yes, no, I just had this conversation with my mom this morning. I said, "Mom, there are people praying on our need to help with Ukraine right now. You're going to get asked for money from people who are bad people and who are stealing it and are not. But we're in this state of emergency right now where we all feel like we need to help. So we forget this good hygiene of don't respond to that."

Richard: Yes, exactly. So that's why I would say things like single sign-on a multifactor go hand in hand with phishing because they can reduce some of the risks of being successful.

Carolyn: Okay, but help me with single sign-on. Again, like I know it's good but if all my passwords are in one place, if they hack the single sign-on, then I'm really screwed. So tell me why it's more secure?

Why Single Sign-on Is Secure

Richard: So, as I like to remind customers, one ring to rule them all did not work out very well for Sauron in Lord of the Rings, right? So yes, you have a single point, that's scary. And if we wind back to the news cycle, we just had a little bit of an Okta scare. Which was a really interesting story. I mean, it was a third-party issue, it wasn't core Okta, but it was still pretty scary. It made people think a lot about the value of single sign-on. But what you're doing is you're trading one set of risks for another set of risks, right?

So the question is, if you don't have single sign-on, you probably have either password reuse run rampant. Or you have people getting breached because they gave up their username and passwords, they're not using multifactor. So in the sign-on, yes, you're putting your eggs in one basket, but then you need to watch that basket really carefully.

Carolyn: Oh, the multi-factor thing. That's key, right?

Richard: Yes. Multifactor is really important nowadays. I mean, we've all been sort of speculating about the death of the password for years. One day that prediction in a threat report's going to come true. Or we're finally going to get rid of usernames and passwords and do something that's a little bit more sophisticated. But the reality is, I think, we're stuck with it for a while, but yes, multifactor is a way to buy down risk around account breach.

The Things You Can Do to Buy Down the...

Join us on Tech Transforms Federal News Round-up segment, So What? Hosted by Carolyn Ford and Tracy Bannon. This week, we talk to Katy Craig, retired Navy Chief, now Adjunct Faculty at National University, & Director, Security Architecture at Aquia, Inc. about some of the biggest news in the federal space. Listen in to hear her thoughts around deep fakes, non-traditional warfare, and President Biden's recently released announcement to protect against cyber attacks.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:25] Monthly Federal News Roundup
• [02:20] Federal News #1: President Biden’s Cyber Security Fact Sheet
• [10:12] The Catalyst
• [14:24] Federal News #2: Zelenskyy’s Deepfake
• [20:55] Federal News #3: The Threat Model
• [25:26] Federal News #4: Russia Is Running Out of Storage Space

Episode Links and Resources

• Katy Craig
• Aquia
• Fact Sheet
• Order 14028

Monthly Federal News Roundup

Carolyn: This week, we are launching our newest series, 'So what?' It is Tech Transforms' federal news roundup. Every month, Tracy Bannon, senior principal at MITRE joins me to unpack some of the biggest trending news topics in federal technology. Tracy, we've been trying to do this, make this happen for a while. I am so happy that this is our inaugural episode.

Tracy: Thank you. I'm really excited because there's so much incredible stuff going on and we keep talking and now we want to talk with others and I'm doubly excited to have a good friend and mentor with us today for our first episode, Katy Craig.

Carolyn: Yes, and Katy is a return guest. We've had her in the past on Tech Transforms and Katy is Acquia's chief of staff, cyber security expert, and retired Navy chief. Today, we're going to talk about, really the number one headline in the news these days.

We keep hearing terms like nontraditional warfare, which is essentially the fifth domain of cyber, and President Biden's recent cyber security fact sheet. And just what it all means, like why is it all happening right now? And I want to just go straight to President Biden's recent announcement, this fact sheet that is. It's titled 'Act Now to Protect Against Potential Cyberattacks'. I want to go to you Tracy, and just unpack this for us. What does it mean?

Federal News #1: President Biden’s Cyber Security Fact Sheet

Tracy: So I believe it was March 21st, the White House released this set of guidance and it is really practical, general guidance. And it really is focused on two different areas. It's kind of like for everybody, for corporate America back up your data, use multifactor authentication, encrypt your data. There's also a call to arms, to tech companies and software organizations that says, you know what, there's a NIST standard and we have an order out here, it's order 14028. We can provide all the links later.

But those two things, they're saying we got to get real about this. And the reason that it came out now is that we need to hear it now with all of the things that are going on in the Ukraine. It was an opportune time. We've had all kinds of security incidents and breaches and other things over the last year or two, but there are some shockers that are coming to the surface that made this very timely for the White House to release this guidance.

Carolyn: So you really feel like this guidance came out because of the war in Ukraine?

Tracy: I think it was probably teed up before that, probably for quite a while. None of goes very quickly. Any kind of guidance that comes out in this way has good generalized information. I would've put it out a year or two ago at least, if not before that. So for me, a little late to the game, but I'll take late because it's there and we've got to have a full-court press around this.

A Call to Federal Agencies, Industry, & Commercial

Tracy: I'll say the one thing that I found super curious in the entire set of materials was that there is a call that says, "Hey, all of you corporations, doesn't matter how big or small you are, get to know your local FBI field office or your CISA regional office." Which is your, I think it's cyber security and infrastructure security agency. I thought that was curious because it kind of meant to me, it was kind of a leading indicator that there might be more that's on the horizon that we're not anticipating, if I need to have a relationship with the FBI.

Carolyn: Interesting, this is a call to our federal agencies and to industry to commercial.

Tracy: It is absolutely. The first section is a call to corporate America. Hey, corporations do this and get to know your FBI field offices. The second part of it is all around tech companies and software companies. He doesn't necessarily directly say, "Hey you government agencies, hey DoD, hey IRS, hey any of your organizations." It's for the population. This is a broad sweeping set of recommendations.

Carolyn: Katy, do you want to comment on the significance of the timing and just this announcement in general?

Katy: Yes. I agree with Tracy that I think it's probably been in the works for some time, better late than never. I think the encouragement for agency or organizations and industry to reach out to CISA and FBI speaks to both pre-positioning for if something else does happen and we have to coordinate. It will be helpful for organizations to know their local FBI and CISA rep.

Executive Order 14028

Katy: But it ties back to the executive order that he released on zero trust, 14028, Tracy mentioned. There's guidance in there for government agencies to encourage vulnerability reports. Almost like if you find something vulnerable in our site or any of our systems or services, please tell us.

So this move toward transparency, it's new and it's not yet been codified. Don't forget, there are still some states where if you report a bug in a website, they can arrest you for violating computer privacy statutes and regulations.

So this is very curious because it's kind of out ahead of the legislation, but it really does point to, we need to be transparent. We can't have silos. We have to share the information across, especially if we're worried about critical infrastructure, like we are.

Carolyn: Okay. You've talked about this a lot, Katy, about trust in culture, our work environment culture, and you just said that if I report a bug, I can get arrested. How is this going to work? If we're being called to, if we see something, say something, and oh, by the way, you might get arrested. Did I just interpret that wrong?

Katy: No, you didn't. That's the conflict that currently exists and why government and the administration is making it very explicit and overt. Please get to know CISA, get to know FBI. I'm sure there's federal encouragement across the states to update their cyber legislation.

Federal News #2: Now Is When We Need More Trust

Katy: Because the law currently is like, if you hack, or if you use a system not for the intent that it was meant to be used for, the laws are currently written to punish the person who got in.

So it's a sticky wicket, something that I'm sure they're thinking about. But to me, that's what I hear the president saying. Like, we know that we have been very discouraging in the past when you let us know we had vulnerabilities in our systems. That time's over. We want to encourage, we want to have bug bounties, we want to splash on our pages that say, "If you find anything, let us know." And so I think that's really what's being discussed here. It's time for us to be more trusting and transparent between industry and government.

Carolyn: Okay. I see. So this fact sheet is hopefully a way to build some trust back.

Katy: It restates what's in executive order 14028, which encourages more transparency, which tells the federal government, you will be more welcoming to vulnerability report. So that is the direction we have to go in if we expect industry to do this with us. with the government.

Tracy: I mean, at the core center of this is getting back to trust, trust, and trust. Which is boy, that's quite a commodity right now. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean, it's hard to come by trust and trustworthiness at all different levels, interpersonal, corporate, governmental, government to government. It is messier than it has ever been. And yet now is when we need more trust than we've ever had, or at least the scaffolding to provide us with that trust.

The Catalyst

Tracy: I kind of think that's where you're going, Katy, is that this gives some scaffolding. If we're going to be transparent, this gives more scaffolding to people to react.

Katy: Yes. I mean you think about private industries, they're not required to. And so what incentives do they have to be open about a vulnerability they've discovered, right? So it's going to take some time for policy and legislation to catch up, but I agree. The scaffolding, it needs to be in place so at least there's a means and a method for sharing the information, especially if something major happens.

Tracy: And do you think any part of this was driven by, the timing of this was driven by what we're seeing in the Ukraine or any other catalyst moment?

Katy: Yes, I do, I think we've seen this before this isn't new, right? We can think about the last time critical infrastructure was brought down by cyber. There's been several incidents in recent history. I mean, we saw the signs, the intel was there, and when Russia annexed the Crimea, they used cyber also. I think all of us are seeing the impacts of the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

Some of the coverage, how certain American social media companies like immediately shut down. The fact that so much of our world economy is supported by cyber, by the networks, by internet protocol traffic, logistics is impacted, all of it. There's so many ways to hurt a state or a country. And cyber is a very low barrier to entry now.

How Important Is the Fifth Domain

Katy: And it's kind of like, what can you trust if anybody can get in there and start mucking around with your networks? I think the fact that Russia and Ukraine are at war, it's obviously a catalyst for why president Biden is paying more attention to the fifth domain, in my opinion.

Carolyn: How important is the fifth domain in any war, but specifically right now with the Ukraine?

Tracy: I think it's front and center. We're watching what's happening on the ground. We are seeing new technologies like the usage of drones, and so we're seeing six gen and other UASS. So the autonomous vehicles, unmanned autonomous vehicles. But at the end of the day, we're also seeing this dramatic impact on the different pieces of cyber, how we can impact the population, how we can impact the country, how we can shake the foundations in very different ways.

It's not only mucking with the network as Katy would say, it's not just that. Also, it's being able to find different ways to affect people groups. It's interesting, my daughter did some studies in how social media could help as there's new government uprisings. And she was looking in the middle east a number of years ago, and I paid attention to it a little bit, but didn't apply it in my day to day. Until this Ukraine thing popped up on the horizon and we started to realize how much you could influence a population.

I mean, think about the deepfake that came out in March about Zelenskyy. It was very poorly done, thank heavens, and he had already prepared for it. But here he is in this deepfake.

Federal News #2: Zelenskyy’s DeepfakeTracy: If you're not familiar with what a deepfake is, they can sample enough of your different recordings of you and your voice to be able to put together an algorithm of you saying something.

And there have been some famous ones of Tom Cruise and other people that are wonderful and fun. This wasn't wonderful or fun. This was Zelenskyy saying, "Hey, countrymen, we're going to surrender." And he very quickly, immediately shot back so there was that fast credibility. It was poor quality, and he immediately was credible to come and say, "This is bunk. This is not me."

But just imagine, imagine as those deepfakes get better and better, that's got to scare people. Not just from a government perspective, but that has to scare corporate America as well. Katy, are you seeing people concerned about deepfakes or doing anything to obfuscate or to protect themselves or, what do we do about that piece? That's such a scare. For me, I normally don't believe something. I go and look at it. Well, now I'm going to look at it and now I find out that my reality is bunk.

Katy: Yes. I'm scared too. I don't even know how to respond. I mean my mind is churning like how would I validate it? Because I usually believe my eyes. I'm like you, I go and look it up. I want to validate what I'm being told or what I'm reading. And so these deepfakes are super concerning. I know that there are people who are less skeptical than I am, who just believe what they see or what they hear. I mean, like even in my own family. So I do get very, very worried about that type of technology in the hands of very skilled propagandists.

How Cyber Ties Into the Kinetic Part of Warfare

Tracy: There are a couple of companies that I'm learning about who are debunking deepfakes. They've got algorithmic techniques that they can figure out very quickly if it was manipulated.

Katy: Fantastic. That's what's wonderful about cyber, right? Something happens that we didn't know or didn't have before, and maybe it's used for bad. So up springs a counter force to fight for good. And so that's how the cyber domain keeps evolving. We don't even know yet what the future's going to hold really.

Carolyn: So yes, we talk about the deepfakes and they are very scary. And then I think about guys on the ground that are fighting with guns and dying. How does cyber tie into the kinetic part of warfare? So we hear this untraditional, nontraditional warfare. I was like, that's not right. So deepfakes definitely like the psychological part of it is devastating, but I feel like there's a tie into the kinetic part of it too, from the cyber angle. Can either of you, Katy, can you speak to that?

Katy: Everything's enabled by cyber, so it's not any different for armies and navies either. And you know, like Tracy was mentioning unmanned craft, autonomous vehicles, that is the future of warfare. When you think about like Navy ships out in flotillas, they chat. I mean to be sure there are fallback methods. But when you think about GPS and timing and how easily you can take down a force's ability to fight back by attacking a logistics chain. Or disrupting their air traffic control, all the systems, all the infrastructure that is facilitated by cyber then becomes part of the battlefield.

Lower Barrier to Entry

Katy: And so the fifth domain, cyber, being added to sea, airspace, and land that's in there for quite a while. I think DoD has been dealing with cyber as a war-fighting domain for well over 10 years. So now it's almost like in a lot of ways, it's still the same as the other wars in the past. It's just, we have better means and greater reach and technology is just making the battlefield and the war smaller. But psychological operations, propaganda, misinformation, those have always been part of the approach.

Carolyn: And easier to do because of cyber.

Tracy: It is easier.

Katy: Low barrier to entry.

Tracy: It's a much lower barrier to entry. Again, going back to the deepfake mentality, before it might have been a leaflet or a pamphlet, right? A couple of generations ago. I could choose to read that and say, it's bunk or it's real. But it's much harder when you are looking for right, we used to turn on the TV to get on news and the news was true. Now, what do we turn to? And I'm not talking about news sources. I mean, what if that deepfake, getting people to identify that as early as possible.

And Katy, you brought up something else about trying to reduce the number of humans on the battlefield. It brought to mind an example of a cybersecurity, one of many, many, many cybersecurity risks. If we're thinking about a drone, for example, if we're thinking about the ability to have unmanned weapons. So there's talk about what that's going to look like in the future.

Federal News #3: The Threat Model

Tracy: There are a number of different protocols that are being discussed on what you can and cannot do. But imagine the situation where they send an armed drone to take out a tank. From a cyber perspective, somebody taps into that and changes the algorithm. So it's not really seeking a tank. It's now seeking a school bus.

That potential is hyper-scary from that perspective when we think about tapping into networks. So the core of all of this, our ability to rapidly identify, predict, identify, and to deal with cyber is an amazing thing that we have to double down on. And I know, Katy you've been in this space for a long time dealing with that. But how does that change or do you think it changes? Do you think it amplifies what we're doing these days from a ZTA and from looking at the threat modeling? Does it change the threat model? Does it make it bigger?

Katy: Absolutely. It does make the surface bigger, but arming an autonomous vehicle with live ordinance and then pointing it at an adversary's infrastructure or enemy armored vehicle, I don't know how soon we're going to get there. There's just so much like international laws about armed conflict that I think would have to be revisited. It's still kind of a gray area when we cross from cyber to kinetic. Whether or not the nation is justified and you in escalating to kinetic, for example.

Even today we're not really responding or hacking back. If someone hacks us, we say we're defending forward. We All Live in The Same House

Katy: Nobody's really stepped out there yet to clearly define how using cyber with kinetic impacts, how that's changing the laws of armed conflict. I don't think we're going to be able to answer that today either. But it's definitely introducing far more complexity and it's moving so much faster than we can actually codify and update laws and policies and treaties.

Tracy: And I think it's going to depend on the different nations, right? The different actors in all of this. My question kind of came from some reading I was doing. I read a book recently called 'The Kill Chain'. I think it's by Cameron Boozer. I'll find the name and post it out.

But that led me on a little bit of an afternoon Google chase one day, trying to understand. And there have been some recent tests by China that would point to them preparing and trying to figure out how they would do this....

Listen in for part 2 of our women's panel with Kris Saling, Chief Analytics Officer for the Army Talent Management Task Force and Director of People Analytics in the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Manpower & Reserve Affairs), and Jazmin Furtado, Liaison at AI Accelerator and Data Strategy Lead at US Space Force. In this episode, Carolyn, Kris, and Jazmin get real about the power of the collective, emerging solutions, and the importance to assess and provide within federal government technology.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:31] Meditation Is Really Good
• [07:40] Where Are We Going With AI
• [13:14] Are Women in Tech Paid Equal Like Their Male Counterparts
• [20:40] Tell People How Much You’re Making

Episode Links and Resources

• Kris Saling
• Jazmin Furtado
• M&RA
• Space Force
• Market Connections Survey

Meditation Is Really Good

Carolyn: We are in part two of our women in technology panel, with Kris Saling, Deputy Director of Army People Analytics, and Captain Jazmin Furtado a Data Strategy Lead at the US Space Force and Space Force Liaison at the MIT AI Accelerator.

On today's episode, we're going to dive more into government technology in general. I get Kris and Jazmin to do a little fortune-telling on where tech is headed. What advancements they've seen in their careers. And we get real with some salary talk. Just a little reminder, the views of Kris and Jazmin are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of their agencies. Now let's get to it on Tech Transforms with our women panel.

I know that meditation is really good for the monks that live in caves in India. And I know that I should probably do it. Until I saw the science behind it and what it can really do for my brain. I dabbled in it. I never fully embraced it. And once I started understanding why it was working and that there was true science behind it, man, I'm all in. I'm just thinking of just one example of things that are good for me in my life, that I've been able to embrace and bring into my life because I understand them. I understand how they work rather than like you said, Kris, the leadership saying, "No, we don't give a shit about how you got there. Just give us the answer."

Make The Process More Efficient

Carolyn: But now you're getting people who really want to understand why. I would imagine that the program for the answers that you've been spoonfeeding them. The programs are becoming a lot more powerful and effective. Because the people who are taking those in the past spoonfed answers. Now really understanding them can truly implement them at a level that is a lot more powerful. Is that true?

Kris: I would say that's definitely true because we're working on a couple of projects right now where we are trying to integrate machine learning into promotions and selections as a decision support tool. I'd never in a million years, would've thought we'd get a chance to work on that data and introduce something that is an algorithm into a just intrinsically human process.

But we have enough people thinking along this vein. We have enough people looking at the data we've collected about how we read records and how we read files. And they're like, "There's got to be an easier way to do this. There's got to be something we can do to support the board, to pull out the key insights. To package them differently, to display them differently, to sort." And they came to us with the question of how can we make this process more efficient?

And I just came back with exactly what the computer is supposed to do. It doesn't get tired, it doesn't get bored. Its attention doesn't wonder, and it can read things a whole heck of a lot faster than we can. So let's see how we can crunch your data a little bit better into more digestible packages for you to review.

A Long Way to Go For AI

Kris: So we keep the human in the process. We keep that comfort level, but now the humans have enough comfort with the machine process. It's not quite human-machine teaming yet. I'm hoping that we'll get to some true instances of human-machine teaming. But we've got an algorithm producing a product that's digestible and a receiver on the other end that trusts it.

Carolyn: So you guys both heavily involved in AI, Jazmin, what are the advances that you see coming up in AI? Be my fortune teller for a minute. What is the landscape looking like in the next year, three years, even five years. Where's it going?

Jazmin: I guess currently what we're seeing is a lot of actually pretty narrow cases of AI. I would say AI is at its current state, not as pervasive in all industries, as we probably would expect. It’s definitely very prominent in a select few industries. But there's quite a few businesses and just overall industries too, that just haven't embraced it to the same extent. And so we still have a long way to go until we see AI really integrated with a lot of our day-to-day work.

Carolyn: Why do you think that is? I don't want to derail. I want you to come back to that, but why?

Jazmin: So I think there's still nervousness by some groups that haven't used it or not as familiar with it. They are not sure how to use it. Or they don't know how it could immediately benefit their operations. Because they don't see the parallels or they don't understand how those parallels could apply in their day-to-day work. So that's a piece.

A Legitimate Concern

Jazmin: Also I think the lack of policy and regulation on AI technology. How to utilize and integrate AI technology into your business also scares a lot of people like, "Am I going to be sued? That's a legitimate concern. To what extent can I use this?

And it's also seen as an extra investment if I'm not using it now. I don't know exactly how it's going to benefit me. It's a coin toss if that's really going to help in the long term. I think some people may think of it like that. Then why would I put up that investment now, if what I'm doing is working for me for the meantime. So there's that near-term view as well.

Carolyn: So we conducted a survey. I worked with Market Connections to pull IT mission owners within the DoD and Fed CIV. And we asked them some of these questions. So what you just said, from your own experience is backed by the data, which we all love. Just that some of the biggest barriers that we saw IT mission owners site for not embracing AI.

First, they thought it was super important and then they needed it. But they hadn't implemented it. And they didn't really have plans to implement it, partly because they're scared of it. They don't understand it. There's a big learning curve. There's a perceived expense. And their challenges, interestingly enough, were finding root cause and accomplishing everything that needed to be accomplished with a limited staff.

I'm just sitting there going, "Hey, I can do this for you and you're not implementing it." So what you just said, like I said, has been validated. I'm sure not just by the survey that I did, but by others. So back to where are we going with AI?

Where Are We Going With AI

Jazmin: I think we're seeing a lot of pretty big breakthroughs in AI technology in the industries that AI's really being embraced. I think we all know about autonomous vehicles, for example.

Carolyn: Really are we going there?

Jazmin: I think it's just a matter of time.

Carolyn: Well, am I going to get an iron man suit then? Because that's what I really want.

Jazmin: That may be a little bit further away. Flying, like individual flying capability is a little bit further away for transportation purposes than recreational. But the autonomous vehicle I think gives technology or just autonomy there in navigation I think is advancing.

I think it is, that will be pretty transformative in terms of our job landscape. What we do on a regular basis. How much time is spent driving tour or driving to places, whether it be leisure, for business, and having that free time. I think a lot of people would buy into having that free time. Of course, there's still things to work out in that arena. But when that's ironed out, I think that'll be a pretty big breakthrough.

I don't know if it's more near term or not. But the concept of the metaverse. I think AI is going to be very important there. AI is very foundational to both of these areas. But I think with the metaverse it's going to provide opportunities for a lot of advancements in AI technology in terms of how it's utilized. With the creation of the metaverse, I know the concepts are still really new. But the potential for it to gather a lot of data and be able to create virtual world.

Exciting and Terrifying Possibilities With AI

Jazmin: It's going to be leveraging AI in ways that it wasn't thought of before. So I think those are really great areas for breakthroughs in AI.

Carolyn: Yes. And think about what it can do to the diversity and inclusion arena. Because we can be whatever we want in the metaverse. I can be a woman, but I can also be a lion if I want.

Jazmin: And interact. I know the possibilities are exciting, but also equally terrifying.

Carolyn: Yes. A little bit.

Jazmin: There’s so much unknown in that. But can't discount the impact that AI and technology is going to have in these arenas. Of course with great power comes great responsibility sort of thing. But I don't think there's any stopping it. It's just a matter of who's going to be at the table to help shape and mold those technologies. The who is the biggest part of it.

Carolyn: Yes. So Kris, you were nodding your head a lot and really a lot when it came to the metaverse. So what are you seeing? What's your prediction?

Kris: Oh goodness. It's hard to top things that Jazmin listed out. Those are kind of the ones that are top of mind. Looking in the personal space, one of the things we're studying is the psychology of human-machine teaming. I don't think it's science fiction I think a lot of it's happening right now, even with our limited AI. Since we have a lot of folks using virtual assistance of some kind to do any number of different functions.

Human-Machine Teaming

Kris: We have virtual chat. We have all these different types of things that we're already interacting with. And we've done a lot of exploration of what the ethics look like in this. I think that's the piece that's going to come up fast because the technology is just going to explode. We have tremendous innovators. Both for better or for worse are going to go out and develop amazing things.

I think if we don't think about how we're going to use these things and how we're going to expect them to interact with us. I just have a policy letter out for staffing on the use of personnel data for various purposes and various roles. And one of the roles we had to include was autonomous systems. What kind of data about our personnel are we going to share with these autonomous systems? Because they're going to be making decisions about how they interact with us.

So I see a lot of interesting things happening in that space. But it's one of the things we've got to get through simulation. We've got to get through the world of what if and figure out how we want these things to interact. What kind of capabilities we need to build in our humans to interact with them. Because I think restraining technology at this point, just Jazmin said, it's not happening.

Carolyn: Let's go back to Spiderman. With great power comes great responsibility. And I am so grateful that I am looking at two leaders in this space that I truly believe have our best interests. Our world, our children's best interest at heart and are going to use this power for good.

Are Women in Tech Paid Equal Like Their Male Counterparts

Carolyn: But I want to come back around to something that we talked about in our last episode. That's just the disparities that we've noticed in the workforce as a woman, challenges that we've run into. So statistics say that we are still not being paid. I hate that we're coming back to pay. But this is an important topic. That we are still not being paid the same as our male counterparts. Now I would hope that in the government, that might be better. But let me just ask you both. Do you think, do you believe that you are being paid exactly what your male counterparts are being paid? Kris, let's start with you.

Kris: We're not going to take the cheaters' rule out and say that because of law and statute, we have to be.

Carolyn: Yes.

Kris: So I think the bigger question is, it's not a monetary cost. It's an opportunity cost more than anything. I'm going to talk both about women and minorities progressing through the system. We see different kind of fall off points where we fail to retain them and we fail to progress. And when we look at it, it's not because of any kind of overt bias or anything that we could fix easily with policy. It's because they're not being brought in.

Again, kind of coming back to that topic about bringing into the network, bringing into the mentorship, bringing into the opportunities. They're either in branches or functions that don't typically get some of the all-star opportunities that allow them to progress rapidly. Or there are other things that kind of contribute to that opportunity cost.

An Opportunity Cost

Kris: So I think there are people who are moving through the space. There are people with very good reputations who are moving through the data space, especially. But I think as an organization, we kind of have to figure out how to broaden the talent bench that we're pulling from. So that we don't overly constrain who we're pulling from, for some of those opportunity positions.

Carolyn: You've seen that with the data that you're looking at, this is not anecdotal. This is not just, this is what I think is happening. This is what you're seeing at a very macro level with the data, the opportunity.

Kris: Yes, anytime we see the disparities, it's like we can almost directly pull back and look at who's in the organization? What functions are they performing? And as an army, we are very focused on command channels. And then anything that kind of falls in as staff or key enabler. Just even with the word enabler, you kind of classify that as secondary. It's something that is supporting my main effort.

We've been trying to challenge that a little bit. Just looking at what the future of warfare, multi-domain operations, enjoying all domain operations look like. There's a lot of digital in those domains. And a lot of the functional areas, a lot of the talent sets that we need are I think going to become a lot more front and center. If they haven't already. I think not at the risk of sounding a little bit doom and gloom, but we really need to focus on those areas. I would say we are, but I can't stop beating the drum to focus on those areas.

Are There Missed Opportunities for Being a Woman in Tech?

Carolyn: Do you personally think Kris that you've had missed opportunities throughout your career because you're a woman?

Kris: I wouldn't say because I'm a woman per se. I think it's more just because I'm an ORSA, I'm an Operations Research and Systems Analyst. And I'm not on a command track. So I've been lucky. I've had commanders who have seen some of the stuff that I do. They’ve seen my value and pulled me into positions where I can exercise that. But that's not true throughout my career field. So I don't necessarily want to say, "Hey, look what the Army's doing." Because they've empowered me to do all this stuff. I was like on one data point and I'm not a representative sample.

Carolyn: Yes. And just for listeners that maybe aren't familiar and you too correct me if I'm wrong. But especially in the DoD, the pay scale is whatever your rank is, that's what you get paid. It doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman or a person of color. And that's why Kris, it was a very good point that it's the opportunity that there's the disparity in. Because theoretically, that pay has to be the same across the board. Jazmin, how about you, as far as pay goes, we just kind of level set that, but have you noticed missed opportunities or anything else through your career?

Jazmin: So I've actually seen quite a few people in the technology realm. And I think this is echoing a lot of what Kris was saying in that, a lot of the incentives for tech professionals in the military are not equal. Or they're not at the same level as maybe more operational roles.

Monetary Incentives for Serving Longer

Jazmin: So as in like the air force gives you incentives. Pilots, you have incentives to stay in for a little longer, you get a little, I don't want to say carrots. But there are some monetary incentives to stay in and serve for longer. If some folks are trying to get out after their commitment. But you don't necessarily see that same incentive structure at all is different depending on what sort of career fields you're in.

And I think there is an effort and you see it in various ways that the services to try to flag people that do have technology specializations or technology backgrounds to try to focus on certain tech fields and operations research was one of them. To try to provide incentives for folks to stay in these fields. So we're seeing a little bit more. But it's definitely not as ingrained as the incentive structure that we see more in the operational community. I think that does play a role in that disparity, not so much from a gender specific realm, but from a job perspective, from a stem point of view.

But I think all of these, the various disparities we see really can be combated in part by increased transparency. So exactly what Kris is doing and providing the analysis and providing that information out to the masses of what the challenges are and leave it to the individual to determine what to do with it.

How is it going? This is hopefully unbiased. So this analysis, this is the information, this is the data, do with it as how you see fit. And that provides incentive for those that are being assessed to make sure that they are making the necessary changes to provide.

Tell People How Much You’re Making

Jazmin: Or to better their own organization in the long term and change their policies or procedures or incentive structure. To be able to keep and attract the talent that they need, which we need to attract the minority diverse fields.

So I think transparency not just on the analysis front, but also on just the pay, just to get broadly speaking outside the government, there are more and more applications now where you can see how much someone in your career field's making. And I think some people want to hold that close and like, "Oh, I don't want to share what I'm making." I'm very much a proponent.

Tell people how much you're making. Mentor people, tell them how much they should be expecting to make in these career fields? Because if you don't have that...

Women in tech unite on this special episode of Tech Transforms featuring Kris Saling, Chief Analytics Officer for the Army Talent Management Task Force and Director of People Analytics in the office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Manpower & Reserve Affairs), and Jazmin Furtado, Liaison at AI Accelerator and Data Strategy Lead at US Space Force. Carolyn, Kris and Jazmin discuss the impact of self-awareness and the importance of data education and fostering change when it comes to government technology.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:27] Introducing the Women in Tech: Kris Saling & Captain Jazmin Furtado
• [10:32 ] Take It From a Human Approach
• [17:27] Pulling Other Women in Tech Into the Circle
• [24:45] Women in Tech Are Influencing One Another
• [30:14] Women in Tech Are Making Sure They’re Helping Everybody

Episode Links and Resources

• Kris Saling
• Jazmin Furtado
• M&RA
• Space Force

Introducing the Women in Tech: Kris Saling & Captain Jazmin Furtado

Carolyn: This week we are going full girl power, so Mark got uninvited. Today we have our Women In Tech panel featuring a couple of guests who have previously been on our show, Kris Saling, Deputy Director of Army People Analytics, and Captain Jazmin Furtado, a Data Strategy Lead at the U.S. Space Force and Space Force Liaison at the MIT AI Accelerator. Welcome back Jazmin and Kris to Tech Transforms to talk about your journeys in government technology.

I'm really excited to talk to both of you again, but before we get into that let me do a little housekeeping. So I just want to remind our listeners that the views of both Kris and Jazmin are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of their agencies. I'm just going to say that for myself, too. Because I warned this, too, before we started. I'm like, "I got some stuff I need to get out." And I want to be able to talk freely today.

Let's start talking about challenges that both of you have faced being a woman in the technology space. The fact that we even have to say, "Being a woman in the government technology space," other than, we're in the technology space and we kick ass. I hate that we have to do that but I still feel like we do. I'm already getting up on my soapbox. But, let's start with you, Kris. Some of the challenges that you've faced.

Kris: So, it's one of those where I don't want to say there aren't any challenges. But I've encountered so many of these challenges throughout my career. I just hit 20 years last summer, I'm going to hit 21 years this coming summer. Yes, it's almost the summer again.

Kris Saling’s Challenges for Being One of the Women in Tech

Kris: So it's been a long time of sitting there with the typical, the anxieties, the imposter anxiety, the "What is my balance between being assertive. And how do I not come off as, "Insert your," kind of "The common anxieties"? It really hasn't been all that different. I've been trying to figure out the right balance of how to present different things. How to present facts so that they are listened to. How to present data to an audience where not only do we have the schism between having an audience that's operational and I'm on the technical side. But sometimes it's very obvious that I know quite a bit more about the subject than the people I'm talking to.

I think one of the biggest challenges is I really didn't get to know myself and how I wanted to present these things. Because I was very much fixed on how to present that particular image until I really got into data education and started teaching people. That really helped me find a balance in how I wanted to talk about very technical subjects, both with a technical and a lay audience.

So I won't say it's overcome all the challenges. You still go out a lot of times, still the only woman sitting in the room. I do have a little bit of a reputation now that I can trade on. So I come into the room with a certain amount of that reputation. But I've seen a lot of cases where that hasn't been the case. Where people have come in and haven't quite known how to throw all those and hold their ground in areas where they're competent. How we make the opportunities to do that because that's where other opportunities come from.

Captain Furtado Shares Her Perspective on Being Part of the Women in Tech

Carolyn: Jazmin, have you felt that?

Jazmin: Yes, so a lot of the same things. I'm very aware of how I may be coming across. And depending on the level I'm speaking at, I have to maybe change the way I present something. Because I'm having to always pick apart and analyze what makes that person tick. I'm not saying that's maybe something specific to women. I feel like maybe everyone has to do that to some extent.

But of course, I only know from my perspective how much of my time goes into not just the content but just my body language, my tone, the inflection in my voice, the pacing of my words. Because a lot is taken away already from visuals and the unspoken. So there's already a front that I put on and that I present to people when I walk into a room. And there's already preconceived notions of who I am and what I can do. So having to overcome those is maybe an extra thing that others may not need to.

But I've thought about this a lot and I try to think about the other's perspective. I've come to realize that a lot of times, most of the times, there's not necessarily any ill intent behind how people perceive others. Maybe there's an audience that is not conscious of their own biases.

I think it's beneficial for all of us to check ourselves and check the comments that we make in the workplace. Because things that may be seen as teasing or something that's lighthearted may actually be eating away at the mutual respect that you have for another person. They may eat into the other person's credibility as a professional, as a leader.The Imposter Syndrome Experienced by Women in Tech

Jazmin: So please be cognizant of these comments because these small things, especially in a public forum, they start eating away at that. And it's not appropriate in the workplace to be making these side comments and thinking that there's no consequence. So just as an input, I guess, for everyone out there, when you're speaking just be aware of your slang or colloquial. Be aware of the unintended consequences of some of the things that are being said.

Carolyn: I'm just going to admit this right upfront. I have found myself through my career. Because I've been in technology for 20 years now. Often the only woman in the room. I've felt like a little bit of an imposter. I started out in product management, definitely felt like an imposter there. Because I was interpreting what developers were saying, trying to understand what users needed. I was always the only woman in a sea of men. Then when I moved to marketing I suffered another kind of imposter syndrome where I thought, "I'm not really in the tech field, but I am." Like, "I need to be able to tell this story."

This is taking a really long time to get to my point. Throughout my career as I look back, I've noticed that I have done things and portrayed myself in a way and used language that I thought would make me fit in more, drink too much, swear like a sailor. But I have to say I love swearing. So I've just embraced that as part of what I really like and no longer consider that me attempting to fit in with the boys because I just like to swear. But other things, even what you were just saying Jazmin about being cognizant of slurs.

Fight Like a Girl

Carolyn: I grew up with a cold war Army dad. Believe me, I have some slurs. And I didn't even realize how offensive they were until pretty recently. Some of the stuff that has come out of my mouth, I'm like, "I can't believe I said that," and towards women. I used to say, "Fight like a girl" all the time as an insult, not as props. So have either of you noticed that?

Kris: So I think there's a lot of that, that's part and parcel. I've enjoyed my later years of being a little more senior ranking and a little more salty overall, of being able to call that out. And to stop people when they're making statements, or even making assumptions about anything having to do with women. Like, certain programs should be marketed this way towards women.

That's usually where I start throwing things at them figuratively because we're virtual. But try to at least get their attention and say, "Hey, guys, you just othered an entire 50% of the population, 17% of the Active Army population. But that still is a large percentage of people that you just said, 'All of these people think the same way.'"

One of the principles that we've been working on in talent management is getting away from the one-size-fits-all method of work and method of leadership. And that has really lent itself to fostering a lot of these discussions about how we work. In the Army at least, it's 1.4 million people when you consider all three components in our civilians, and they're all different and everybody is different.

Carolyn: Oh, so take it from a human approach, is that what you're saying?

Take It From a Human Approach

Kris: Shocking, isn't it? As opposed to the industrial model that we employed over the past 50 years where everybody is interchangeable. And we don't see you as a human. We see you as some kind of a cog categorized by your grade and your career field. Instead, let's look at you as a person. Let's do some, shocking again, human-centric design, and let's start seeing people as people for capabilities. Rather than what we assume comes with and based on people's personal biases.

They make a lot of assumptions that people come with a lot of baggage. So I think we're making some progress. Again, when I say we're making some progress it's like we're starting here. We know it still goes on heavily throughout the organization. But we're getting our foot in the door there.

Carolyn: So you're not going to admit to anything that you've done in the past?

Kris: Oh, you mean as far as things I've said or things I've done?

Kris: I just spent 12 years as a combat engineer. So that was the first 12 years of my army, work hard, play hard, swear hard, still swear hard. I have to remember sometimes that I'm in an office building.

Carolyn: Did you go into combat to prove something?

Kris: I graduated from West Point in 2001 and all the women that I trained with there, all the women I met in my officer basic course in our first unit, we always were under pressure to prove that we belonged. It was always the, "Oh, we're going to prove that we can do this and we can do that thing." But it was always earning your place and proving you belonged, which was a heck of a lot of pressure.

Women in Tech Experience a Lot of Pressure

Carolyn: Yes, the first has to be better, stronger, the first always has to. So what about you, Jazmin? Are you going to admit anything?

Jazmin: Well, I can't actually think of any examples but I know it has happened to me. And I don't think anyone ever perfects the self-policing of the agency. Check yourself before you make statements. But as long as the intent is there and the effort, at least, in some regard have measured. And the progress is being seen and being able to proactively catch things before you say something. Or recognize that a topic may not be the best one, maybe there's another topic to bring up, it's great.

I think in my previous job I didn't really appreciate the role that a person that's put in a leadership position or authority has over that culture. It's the little things that a leader does. The topics they bring up, the things that they decide to talk about just in a forum. What topic? Are you just going to talk about one topic all the time? Maybe sports, the stereotypical one. Who are you leading? Get to know them. What are the things that they're interested in and then as a leader, make sure that you can represent your team and their interests, and talk to them and connect to them in a way that is more comfortable for them.

So when I was at Kessel and I actually saw that quite a bit. There's a lot of these cultures that are pushing for psychological safety and the training that comes with it. And seeing it more in the workplace, making me more aware, it makes me take a look, "Oh, what are things I said before."

An Environment of Psychological Safety

Jazmin: And I'm still trying to think of an example but nothing comes to mind right now. But yes, I think those trainings have been really great because the people in specific roles have a big part to play in that.

Kris: Jazmin, if I can jump on one of the things you said about talking about the same topics all the time and here's how people connect. We've talked about that a lot in the return to the office, the people who are pressing for it and the people who aren't. A lot of the people who are pressing for it, we're finding some commonalities in the ways that they want to connect. And a lot of the workforce that they have who doesn't want to come back hasn't connected with what they feel like that office culture is.

So I think when you start talking about providing an environment of psychological safety and providing an office identity that people can connect to. How do we connect ourselves with that culture? We really have to think about that if we want people to maintain that connection, both remotely and when they come back to the office. Or if they come back to the office. I'm a big proponent of remote work. I just have to throw that in there.

Jazmin: Yes, and definitely it has to be very proactive. It's a lot of work to do that. And it takes people out of their comfort zones to push for certain topics, push for events, push for these kinds of forums to happen. It doesn't just happen by itself, you can't just will it. So yes, it's really great to hear.

Women in Tech to Fostering Change

Carolyn: So I'm going to put us all on the spot a little bit to foster this change. Because the truth is, at a macro level we are still grossly in the minority. So what have we done personally to help foster this change? Maybe an easier question is what have you seen leaders do to help foster this change or have they? Or are we still missing this? So, Kris, I know this is a focus for you because it's your job. What do you recommend? What's happening?

Kris: Are we talking about just making more opportunities, more mentorship? I'm going to guess, all.

Carolyn: All of it, is that where we start, just making more opportunities and how do we do that? I think what we're doing right now is an important thing because we're talking about it.

Kris: I think we're talking about it and we have three women in tech in this conversation who have been imminently successful in their own domains. And we've all been in domains where there's not a whole heck of a lot of us. We've had mentors who are male who have come in, who have seen something in us. Who have seen those qualities and have provided advice, who have provided guidance.

And every time, at least lately since I've been more aware of it, I've had a mentor provide that guidance. I've encouraged them to think about, "Why are you providing me that guidance? Is it because of this particular thing, that particular thing?" Let's reach out and look at all the people you have in your mentorship circle and figure out who's not there. What are the other kind of opportunities?

Pulling Other Women in Tech Into the Circle

Kris: And I've started learning to ask myself, I need to be better about it, it's like, "Who else can I pull into that circle?"

Carolyn: So are you mentoring then? Even officially, unofficially, you find people to mentor as well.

Kris: I do. I've had a lot of people talk to me. Because I work in a very interesting niche. There are a lot of people who try to figure out what exactly my job categories are. Because we're doing all the things, people analytics, we're doing talent management for the Army's data workforce. We're doing data education and there's been a lot of focus on just, "Who's going to take over the programs? Who's coming up?" Because they know at some point or another I'm going to retire. I'm going to go do something else. And I'm going to go start other projects. I'm going to try to carry on the somewhat entrepreneurial frame that I've looked at things in the Army with some other venture.

So I look around like, "Okay, who's coming up? Who's got interest in some of the same projects I'm working on? Who really wants to foster change? How can I bring them in and get them some of those connections and get them some of the experiences working with the different types of projects and project leads and leaders." And as I'm doing that I really want to make sure that I'm bringing in all of those perspectives. That I'm bringing in not just more of the same. Because we want new perspectives. We as an organization have said very emphatically that we want change. Now we just need to prove it by bringing in people who can make the change and who see things differently.

Good Mentor vs Bad Mentor

Carolyn: Well I love that you have a mentor and that you are mentoring. Jazmin, have you had mentors, male or female? Do you participate in some official or unofficial mentoring?

Jazmin: So I have had quite a few great mentors. I've had a couple of pretty bad supervisors take on leadership roles. I think what has distinguished them is the good mentor, the people that I really look up to listen. They figure out what motivates me. They really try to find what am I really looking for out of my career. And they don't look at what can I provide to their organization right now. That makes all the difference when you're not seen as just someone that outputs and delivers products.

I think the people that have been great mentors look at the potential that I can provide in the long term. And that being able to give me those opportunities that feed my own personal and professional growth does both things. It both helps myself and it helps the organization. Because I'm being put in the best capacity and being put to best use in the organization.

So like I said, I've had the opposite as well where folks are just, how do I say this? I am in this organization for two years. As much time as they can put into me doing that one and one job only, and my scope is this big, there's no way for me to say anything else around it. Because that role is really important to the organization and they need me to do X, Y, Z. And those are positions that I do not thrive in.

Women in Tech Are Helping Each Other

Jazmin: But from a mentorship or from a supervisory standpoint, if you don't get to know your people then you're going to realize the limitations that you put on yourself and your organization as a result, so, yes. In terms of me mentoring other people, I have found LinkedIn to be great. This is not a plug but it's the only way actually that I get to talk to people outside of my realm here. There are some events that I'll speak at via recruiting events or...

What does it mean for an agency to monitor applications with empathy to achieve successful mission outcomes? Bill James is the President of Federal Business LLC and FedSmarts LLC. He is also a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Development and Operations in the Office of Information and Technology at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He joins Carolyn and Mark to talk about the importance of application monitoring, culture, and empathy when executing a mission.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:30] Introducing Our Guest, Bill James
• [09:29] The Onus of the User Experience
• [20:33] Applications Monitoring Is Integrated into the VA Process

Episode Links and Resources

• Bill James
• FedSmarts LLC
• Federal Business LLC
• Department of Veterans Affairs

Introducing Our Guest, Bill James

Carolyn: So today, our guest is Bill James. He is president of Federal Business LLC. In his previous role as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Development and Operations in the office of Information and Technology at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Bill led the VA's largest information technology organization to deliver enterprise-wide technology products and services to veterans.

He has been able to carry those skills into his current role as president of Federal Business LLC. And today, we're going to get Bill's perspective on why Application Performance Monitoring or APM is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. And he just recently put out a blog that, I'm going to nerd out here, I really like the blog. It's easy to understand.

One of the things he says in it, or some of the perspectives we're going to get from him, is how APM for VA software applications is necessary now and critical for the future. And how it helps the VA, and I'm going to throw in there, like any organization, any agency, avoid or recover from outages, increase VA OIT productivity and observability, offer insights into investments needed for innovation and understand and improve the customer experience of veterans. I love that last bit. The customer experience.

Bill: Thank you very much, Carolyn and Mark. I'm really happy to be here today, and you've touched one of my hot buttons. I'm really interested in all of it, how the technology ultimately relates and improves the end-user experience. Specifically and particularly, our veterans. And that's why I loved working at the VA so much.

Focus On Veterans’ Experience

Carolyn: Well, and that topic I feel like is especially timely Mark. Especially with the presidential executive order around user experience. I mean, you're kind on the cutting edge, Bill. I mean, you've been doing this before it was cool. You've been worried about the customer experience.

Bill: That's right. I grew up as a programmer, a coder, and as a mathematician. It was always interesting to me how we could build a code and write it. And we thought our job was done when we hit the end card, back in the day when we had punch cards.

But that wall, was frankly was a false wall, and what we never thought through, I think clearly enough into what that code actually did for the end-user. So I think with the new executive order and clearly the focus on the veterans' experience in the VA, that wall came crumbling down for me particularly. It was really a great place to work and a great place to exercise this whole idea of customer experience from the IT perspective specifically.

Carolyn: We're definitely going to dive more into that. Before we go there, for our listeners that may not be as familiar with application performance monitoring or APM, will you give us a quick definition of what that is?

Bill: Yes. It's the heartbeat of your systems, and specifically of software. So, many folks have gone to the doctor or seen these electrocardiograms, where they put these things on your chest and you have the little needle that draws how your heartbeat beat is beating.

What Is Application Performance Monitoring

Bill: Software needs that very same type of telemetry, where it can show everybody it's alive, it's working, it's working well. And then you can also take that very same monitoring capability and say, "Well, okay, fine. You think your software's working well in the black little box, how is the user experiencing it?"

So your software may be working, but the user network may be down so the user can't see the software, even if the software's running. This end to end understanding of what is working and how does it relate through all of the layers of technology to the end-user, and having the tools that really give you a dashboard to allow you to see that from a management perspective, see that monitoring data from a management perspective, that's APM. So in my view, it's the software EKG.

Mark: I think this is a very fascinating topic, not just because we work at Dynatrace, but because of what you've said and what I've read in your articles. I have seen resistance across other agencies, to adopt and to look at the world the way that you have described it. Why is that happening? Can you help us understand why we see this across other agencies?

Bill: I think that a lot of it is cultural. I used to say, and I still believe this, that DevOps equals empathy. And it's not just empathy for the end-user, but Dev and Ops, and the other phrase, DevSecOps, the development, the security, and the operations, grew up as stovepipes in the IT world.

Empathy: Monitor Applications and Care About Your Neighbor

Bill: And they still operate that way in a lot of ways. So empathy means you care about your neighbor. You care about the other parts of your organization and you obviously very much so, care about the end-user.

I think every organization, every federal agency, every company, needs to first of all, think about who your customers are. But secondly, internally, think about, how can our culture be inclusive and empathetic in the sense that, I don't live in a stovepipe, everything that I do affects somebody else.

It's more than just soft words because you can measure that and you should be able to monitor that. Which takes us right back down to, from a software perspective, the application performance monitoring. I want the software folks to care at three o'clock in the morning, if their software application goes down, I want them to be the first one to get the phone call, "Hey, your code broke."

And then the blog, I quoted my YBI YOI "You built it, you own it, right?" You don't drop and run. Once you build that code, you own it forever. And not only do you own it, but you own it with your partners, the security partners, and the operations partners. So I think APM gives that foundation for everyone to share a common view of what's going on. Therefore it begins to break down those stovepipes.

Carolyn: That goes back to what I mentioned before. One of the most important benefits to me of the DevSecOps is that everybody becomes responsible for that user experience. We take the onus off of the user. You gave an analogy of the airline pilot. I'm going to let you share that analogy.

The Aha Moment to Monitor Applications

Bill: Yes. So the idea is, imagine if you were a passenger on an airline and the pilot announced "I have no instruments in the cockpit, so please let me know if one of our engines stopped running." You're asking the passengers to let you know, because "Hey, I'm flying blind and I sure hope everything works out, but if it doesn't, please let me know." I mean, that's silly.

But that's how IT used to work, and to a large degree, in VA, it's very different now, we've changed, come a long way. But we have plenty of instruments that monitored networks and plenty of instruments that monitored computers. And of course, we had thermometers and data centers. We have all sorts of instrumentation around the computing part, but we didn't have much instrumentation or monitoring on the software part.

So the ops had a lot of instrumentation, not so much the Dev, not so much the applications. And so, when we came up to the delivery of the software supporting the mission act in June of 2019, I was nervous. Because we didn't have what we needed from a software monitoring perspective. We scrambled and cobbled together, a lot of things, but it's come a long way since then. And that was that aha moment for me really, it's the, "Oh my gosh. We don't have the instrumentation, the monitoring observability that we need on this code."

Carolyn: Well, I love what you say in the blog. I'm just going to read directly from the blog here. The software folks needed to feel like they were part of a larger team, the mission, right?

Bill: Yes.

The Onus of the User Experience

Carolyn: That was responsible for the end-users experience. So we take the onus off of the passengers, to let me know if there's an engine out and we own that. And it seems like, especially within government, the onus of the user experience has been on the end-user a lot and partly because where else are they going to go, right?

Bill: Exactly right. Trouble tickets, that was the way that the software folks knew when their application was down, was when a trouble ticket was issued by a user. "Hey, this is not working." And so it's like the pilot, when a passenger, raises his hand, "Hey, one of the engines is out." That shouldn't be the first time you hear that.

You should beat your users to the punch in terms of knowing what's going down when a disc drive is filling up or when some application is having problems and it has to be taken the entire perspective, from the code to the end-user. We have to be observant of what's going on.

And so exactly right. It's really, really critically important that we take measure of what's happening in our infrastructure and how our users are affected.

Carolyn: So, you mentioned that at the VA, you saw a lack of APM, the lack of APM exposed a cultural crack. What do you mean by that? Unpack the cultural crack that you saw?

Missing to Monitor Applications May Result in Cultural Crack

Bill: Right. So as the deputy secretary for DevOps, I saw both sides. I saw the development and then I saw the operations. And when you have a lot of the metrics and the instrumentation on the ops side, and very little on the dev side, to me, it exposes a responsibility gap.

And to your point, this is a joint responsibility and the whole idea of product management, which is something that the VA has pivoted to as opposed to project management, when you move to product management. That product idea includes everybody, your user, the inside developers, your operations. It is the manifestation in a lot of ways of this DevOps or agile way of life and way of developing and operating code.

So the cultural divide that I saw was that the software folks and I'm one of them by the way, would write the code, and what I call drop and run. They'd write the code and they would expect the operations teams to run it. Well, that's great.

And when things break, the software folks are the ones, in some cases, if there's a bug or some security exposure or something, they're the ones that get called. But the responsibility was pretty much on the operations side of the fence. So from a cultural perspective, I wanted to balance that. So everybody had a role, Dev, Ops and the user, nothing like having a great champion, a business champion who owns the operational responsibility of the outcomes, for example, of a specific piece of software.

But if you have that great team and they're bound together, that's the essence of a product team, as opposed to a project team where you have milestones and you have an end, right?

We’re All in This Together

Bill: Every project has an end, but that's not, in the software business, that's exactly the point. It does not end. You as a project manager for building an application, you build the application, and your responsibility doesn't end there and you get to move on to another project.

Yes. You get to move on to another project, but your responsibility for the previous project does not end. It endures. And you are now part of a team with the operations and the security and the end-user, to make sure that the end-user experience is good and frankly, great.

So that idea that we're all in this together, that we are a holistic team, not just chunks or pieces in a series of milestones, or that we are all in it together, forever together in service of the veterans. So that's a very passionate thing about anybody who works at the VA. Everybody that has heard me talk about that before, that working at the VA is like no other agency. Their purpose is so clear, like no other company, and it's so noble.

You feel good about working there and you get passionate about providing the services to the veterans that they've earned. So when you tie that fantastic noble objective, with the toolsets and the culture being able to deliver it, it's just a fantastic experience for me.

The Culture in the Veterans Affairs

Mark: Bill, do you feel like, obviously the culture helps with the mission because your end users are veterans and you want to support veterans, et cetera. So, I completely get that. Do you think having everything under your purview when you were there, helped make that happen, as opposed to maybe some other organizations within government?

Bill: Yes. I think yes. And I don't get the credit for that. We have some fantastic leadership, that moves VA in that direction. Frankly, we had some fantastic technology support. VA has a great digital service team there. They brought a lot of great new ideas. APM was one of them. I give them credit for that.

My friend, Steve Vito says, "Lead with your ears, not with your mouth. Everybody was born with two ears, one mouth, use them in that ratio." But in order to adopt those ideas, you have to be open to listening to them. Then from that perspective, having a DevOps organization, now it's DevSecOps organization, you do have all the levers in front of you to knit the culture and the toolsets and the objectives together. Frankly, that was really one of the reasons why we could do what we were able to do in VA and why they've continued to move ahead in a lot of great ways since that point.

I think a lot of other agencies, they absolutely should look at this DevOps model or the DevSecOps model and consider that. The other thing that's different that the VA had, that all the other agencies don't, is that we have a strong CIO in the VA, and they had the financial accountability and authority that was viewed in the CIO role, by the Clinger-Cohen Act.

The Challenge to Monitor Applications in DoD

Bill: A lot of other agencies don't have that single accountability from a budget perspective. So when you have the culture, you have the purpose and you have the ability to control the finances with a single governance model, that makes your life a whole lot easier. A lot of agencies don' have those very same authorities and powers imbued into the organization. So I think those are all necessary pieces of the puzzle.

Mark: Do you think that your colleagues on the DoD side of the house struggle with that? Because there's not that connection between the DevSecOps side of the house and maybe the mission owner, you wouldn't say line of business, but the mission owner?

Bill: I think so. As an IT person, it's hard, like in the DoD, for you to see the outcomes of your activity. So you might be writing a line of code, and maybe if you're in the air force, for example, you may have six or seven layers removed from still on target or some mission outcome. So it can be more difficult in organizations like DoD than in an agency like VA where the purpose is so absolutely very clear and crystal clear. We build kiosks or at least the software for kiosks that our veteran touches. That's very close to you as an IT person and you can see the outcomes directly, not so much in DoD, your outcomes are farther away and it's harder for you to see.

The Old Waterfall Model

Bill: Having said all that. I do believe that the idea of tying your operators and the users, for example, an air force pilot let's take the software person and the hardware, the operations infrastructure person, tying those three legs of the stool together, I think, produces the aha moments that you don't otherwise get when you live in your own little stovepipes. And so I would absolutely recommend that.

Mark: When you were on that side of the world, were they creating software factories at that time?

Bill: Yes, there were a few software factories, but it was still the old waterfall model. And so the software factories produced code that someone else implemented and operated. And so the software factories that the VA is building and a lot frankly, everybody's thinking about the idea of virtual software factories. But if you do that in an agile sense, in a DevOps sense, you get very different outcomes.

So let's build something today, that's fully instrumented and fully secure. But let's build and deliver something today as opposed to plan to deliver something perfect, maybe never. So the whole waterfall model I think really builds and frankly constructs a lot of these cultural boundaries that we try to erase in the DevOps.

And so, back to the APM, it doesn't matter what you build, and it doesn't matter what process you use if you don't know how it operates. If you have no observability, no insights into whether it's up or down, no understanding if it's alive or Dev. Two in the morning, I want to be able to not literally, but figuratively hear that heartbeat of the application that my code is running. And so it puts a smile on your face and you can sleep comfortably. Applications Monitoring Is Integrated into the VA Process

Bill: But if it's not, I want to be the first to know. So that's a critical piece of operation, frankly. And it's something that ties you as a software builder to the operation in ways that frankly you don't get into in a waterfall model.

Carolyn: Do you think that the VA has now baked APM into their process? Like they're using it?

Bill: Yes. Policy-wise, yes. Tools wise. Yes, I think culturally, we still, the VA have a way to go. I mean, we made huge progress. I mean it’s night and day difference. But I think there's still a way to go there. The software inventory in a VA is huge. 800 to a thousand applications in the VA software inventory. A lot of that code is legacy code that has been and still works and runs OnPrem. And they still turn out the goods and batched jobs like it has for years.

So now you've got these applications. And I think a lot of agencies do these applications that are very successful in what they do and what they accomplish. How do you go back into those and introduce modern tools? Say like APM, how do you move, what I call the electronic alligator clips? How do you attach those to these old legacy...

Consolidation, innovation, and perspective all need to work together in government IT according to Eric Trexler, VP of Global Governments and Critical Infrastructure Sales at Forcepoint. IT acts as an enabler of business in the challenging landscape of government technology. Listen in to find out what Eric believes the United States IT space should be focusing on in order to stay ahead of the adversaries.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:25] All About Innovation with Eric Trexler
• [10:39] An Enabler of the Business
• [18:27] We Haven’t Seen Consolidation
• [21:37] Choosing Fiefdom Over Consolidation and Innovation
• [27:49] The Commercial Component of Innovation
• [32:32] There Are Productivity Gains Out of Innovation

Episode Links and Resources

• Eric Trexler
• Forcepoint
• To the Point Cyber Security
• Think Again
• The Generals

All About Innovation with Eric Trexler

Carolyn: Today, our guest is Eric Trexler, Vice President of Global Governments and critical infrastructure at Forcepoint. Eric is an expert in the technology industry with more than 25 years of experience with both the public and private sectors. And Eric and I used to host To The Point Cybersecurity podcast together. So today is actually a real treat for me to see your face again, Eric. So, good morning.

Eric: Good morning. And it's bizarre being back on the air with you, Carolyn.

Carolyn: So, today, we're going to talk about the perplexing and growing cost of cybercrime and how we can shift the paradigm. But before we jump into that, Eric, you have actually a pretty fascinating background. So, can you just tell us a little bit about your journey?

Eric: My journey in IT? Or where would you like me to start?

Carolyn: Let's not go all the way back to birth. Let's start at your Airborne Ranger days. How about that? And then how you got to where you are today. So yes, technology.

Eric: So, I was an aimless kid at about 17 with no potential to pay for college. No easy path at the time. And I said, I'm joining the army against my mother's wishes to become an Airborne Ranger.

The Requirement to Be a Navy SEAL

Carolyn: At 17?

Eric: Yes. She had to sign the paperwork so I could join the delayed entry program. The military throws at you when you have a high ASVAB score, that's the entrance. And I had a high ASVAB score. So, I saw the Navy and they wanted me to be a nuclear engineer. And I just wanted to be a Navy SEAL back in the day before people knew what the Navy SEALs were. But you had to pick a rating, I believe they call it in the Navy.

So, I'm sitting in front of the recruiter, and he's like, "Okay, but what do you want to do?" And I'm a dumb kid, I'm 17 years old. "I want to be a Navy SEAL." "Well, you can't do that. You have to have a rating. You have to have this skill at trade." And nothing, absolutely nothing was interesting to me.

So, I left. I went to the army recruiter and enlisted. Because they'd let me be an airborne, I was unassigned airborne, technically. How I became an Airborne Ranger? I didn't want to be normal and I was in jump school and talked to a gentleman and I didn't want to wear chemical gear. This was right at the end of the first Gulf War, and everybody was running around in MOPP suits. If you remember that MOPP suits? Hot, heavy, you can't see.

MOPP Gear

Mark: You can't breathe.

Eric: Same reason I didn't want to be in a tank or a ship or a plane. I wanted to be on my feet and I wanted to be able to move. And I was like, "I don't want to wear MOPP gear." The guy said, "Here's what you do." And that's what I did. So, I literally made the choice because I did not want to wear a helmet and I didn't want to wear MOPP gear.

Carolyn: You sound like my six-year-old niece, how she chooses what she wants to do is whatever that doesn't require shoes.

Eric: I was probably about as evolved at that point in time. Mark, you know what it's like to be a 17-year-old boy. I mean, you're really pretty low on the intelligent decision-making maturity scale, right?

Mark: Maturity scale.

Eric: I mean, you're just not there. It was a great choice and it's how I got into IT. Because in about '92 or so I started building computers. And we got a computer in probably '94. The first computer in my unit to run, just to manifest for drops, exercises. It was literally an electronic typewriter, the way these guys thought about it. I’m with a bunch of infantrymen.

I was the only guy in the unit who had new computers, the only guy, I built them for gaming. So, I volunteered for college. I said, "If you allow me to set up college courses for the detachment, 60 person volunteer detachment I was in, I will work in the operations department with a computer." And that's what I did and my career just took off from there.

The Journey From Army to University

Carolyn: How long were you in the army?

Eric: Four years, 17 weeks, and I think four days or something with my contract.

Carolyn: And then where did you go?

Eric: University of Maryland. So, it was a great ride. It was even before the amazing benefits the government gives you in the GI Bill today. The GI Bill in army college plan to go to a college fund. It was like $28,000 for four years of service. That was the optimal breakpoint. You could do five or six, but you really didn't get a lot. You got to like 32,000. And my goal was to go to college.

Mark: Did you go to college full time or did you kind of dual shift at school and work at the same time?

Eric: So, I probably got about a year in the military when I moved into operations and ran, I didn't run but I did a lot of the operations work with a couple of V6s. At the time I was an E-5. But then, when I went to college, I went full time and I worked somewhere about 40 hours a week. I had a kid. My first son was born at 20. So, I'm out of the military at about 22, and I had to keep the lights on. And I had to get my college education and get moving. So, I was working full time and I was working and I was going to school. I was doing probably 21 credit hours a semester on average.

The Innovation to Get Serious in Life

Mark: Yes, that'll make you grow up.

Eric: It's interesting. I have three boys and I think the maturity level as you watch them and their friends. Twenty-five is the magic age, in my opinion, plus or minus three years for maturity in boys, that's just Eric's principle here. Unless you have a kid at 20 and you're in the military and you don't have a lot of help. And then, you grow up really quickly. I stopped going to Nashville every weekend for parties and concerts. I stopped drinking. It was time to get serious about life and take on the responsibilities that I had. It was good.

Carolyn: What was your first job out of college?

Eric: So, I bartended a little bit until I got a job at Microsystems working on, I was a QA test engineer for all of two weeks. I don't think I ever told you this.

Carolyn: No, I'm learning new things.

Eric: It was absolutely miserable. I was the worst QA test engineer ever. So, I'm IT savvy. I can build computers. I've been building computers for years. I know the Windows operating system. I'm pretty good at what I'm doing for that age and that period of time in life. I couldn't sit still. I kept talking to the developers. I'm supposed to sit there and run test routines all day and look, I had a bank of three monitors, and I literally could not sit still. Two weeks later, I was like, "This isn't working." And my boss at the time, I can't remember her last name. It was Melissa. She was awesome. She says, "You're right." And we had customer service problems.

From Traditional Apples to Apple

Eric: So, we took an employee kitchen. We moved a bunch of computers and tables into it. And we became like an R&D faction that helped customer support issues. So, we got all the hardest issues because we sat in R&D. And it worked great for the company. It worked great for the customers, and most importantly, for me.

Because I was always talking to people and fixing problems and doing things as opposed to watching automated test scripts build all day. It was the most boring job ever for me. Actually, I sorted apples once for a day and my grandfather was a produce farmer. And he took me to this amazing job. I think it paid four bucks an hour to sort apples, and that was probably worse than the testing, Carolyn.

Carolyn: Worse than QA?

Eric: Yes, at least with the QA, I have computers.

Mark: I thought you were talking about the Apple computers.

Eric: No, I'm talking like Macintosh and ROM, and the traditional apples in Pennsylvania. And just moving on a conveyor belt and sorting and checking apples all day was like the most mindless activity and it just did not work for me. But you're getting a lot out of me that I would say many close family members and friends have never even heard.

Carolyn: All right. So, which brings us to today. Well, before you came to Forcepoint, were you at McAfee right before Forcepoint?

McAfee to Forcepoint

Eric: Yes. So, I worked at Micros and I got my MCSE. I was really good at databases. And I went to Sybase at that point, great database company. I had a friend bring me over. And then, I went to EMC after that and learned storage area networking at the best of the best. So, I've got database IT storage background servers, I built them. And then I went to Salesforce.com for a two-year PhD in the Cloud

This was a great experience and it was challenging at the same time based on the customers and the sheer growth there. That's all they cared about. So, then I went to McAfee and really took up the InfoSec or cybersecurity side of the business, which I've been doing for the last 12 years and it drives me crazy. Because we get further and further and further behind the adversary.

Mark: That's interesting that you bring up the whole Salesforce thing, because they were probably one of the first software service companies that were out there.

Eric: Certainly, at scale. And the scale there right now, Mark, is, I was looking the other day. I have a couple of friends there and I had lunch with a friend. I mean, what they're doing today, I could have never imagined in the 2008, 2010 timeframe.

An Enabler of the Business

Carolyn: So, Eric, you and I have been talking about cybercrime, cybersecurity for a while now. And you've written some recent articles, and you've been talking about it. I want to talk about the problem of cybercrime. And you just mentioned that we're getting further and further behind. And when you and I talked earlier, it just reminded me of the Alice in Wonderland quote, when she's in the Red Queen's race and the Red Queen tells her, "We have to run faster and harder here just to stay in place." And Alice is like, "Well, that's stupid." So, let's talk about the massive amounts of money that we're spending on cybercrime and cybersecurity, and what needs to change.

Eric: Yes, I can talk to some of that. I certainly do not have the answers on what needs to change. I thought you put that quote in because of me. Because it's actually something that my old CTO and CMO at McAfee wrote in a book called The Second Economy. They quote Alice, in that specific quote, in the context of cybersecurity.

So, we're just talking about my career, up until 2010, when I really joined cybersecurity, hardcore for the first time. I'd always build things.

IT is an enabler of the business, it builds things to make business run better, faster, cheaper, whatever it may be, but it's an enabler of the business. First Mover Advantage

Eric: And you're always growing and building things. The problem with cybersecurity is you're getting further and further behind. You're not necessarily building things to make things better. You are kind of putting things together to try to prevent things from getting worse. It's almost the flip side of the coin, if you think of it that way.

Mark: Eric, do you think that the fact that we're getting further and further behind is a function of the discipline of cybersecurity and that we're just behind there? Or is it the fact that adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, are investing more? And General IT like encryption quantum computing or artificial intelligence and stuff like that. Is it more a function of that or the discipline of cybersecurity?

Eric: I really think it's both, Mark.

So, when you understand the rules of the cybersecurity world, the adversary gets first mover advantage. They get to decide every single time how they want to attack you, how often they want to attack you. They essentially get an unlimited number of tries. Because it's risk and treasure.

When you look at it, what's the risk versus the opportunity? That's the probability of cyber there and the risk is very low. You don't see a lot of people going to jail, you don't see a lot of people losing money in cybersecurity, you see them gaining. At the nation state level, you don't see a lot of sanctions and things like that, because of cybersecurity action. It's almost like there are no red lines, and they're just taken for granted.

Innovation and Consolidation

Eric: And if we're going to go into a country and surveil their networks, or our adversary steal our IP all the time, it's almost accepted, unfortunately, these days. So, you've got the adversary first-mover advantage, they get as many tries as they want. There are no silver bullets here. And then you look at the defender side, we don't have enough people, depending on who you look at data-wise, where cybersec.org is good. They'll show you we're probably a million-plus people behind on the cybersecurity side of just being able to hire. We don't seem to innovate and that's an interesting comment, if you're me, in an industry that has four or 5000 players.

But that leads to my next point, we don't consolidate. The industry really hasn't consolidated. If you look at most of IT, look at storage or I mentioned databases or operating systems or even networking, there are usually two or three key players. We don't have that.

And then, when you look at the incentive side of the equation for the defender. If you pick a tool, a cool tool, I'm going to take you back to 2012, sandboxing. Sandboxing was the end all be all as FireEye at the time. Kind of took what was in academic labs and productized it and marketed the hell out of it. Palo Alto did the same thing with the next-gen firewall to iterate on the firewall side. You take a tool that's really hot and really cool as an IT operator, a security operator, and you buy it and bring it into the business while you're doing pretty well.

A Quick Innovation of the Adversary

Eric: What's the efficacy rate? We're probably not able to measure that as businesses, most people don't care. And you just deployed a cool tool in 2012, called sandboxing. Well, the adversary quickly innovated around that. They had the ability to look for sandboxing, am I running in a virtual machine, is my malware running in a virtual machine. They put in things like time delays, which are really easy.

The sandbox isn't going to sit there for 30 hours and wait for your malware to activate, it's going to look for it to activate right away. So, I'll just put a seven-day delay in and you can quickly innovate around that. And that's okay. But the defenders aren't any much better for it, let's put it that way.

Now, if you're the person on the team who brought in that tool, you can probably go to a bank or another company and say, "Well, look at my resume. This is exactly what I did. Regardless of effectiveness, I can do the same thing for you and get a huge increase." Because we all know or I think most people know, the only people really making money in cyber, in general, are the employees.

But if you're on the defender side, if you're on the attacker side, if you're on the vendor side, maybe you could argue government employees aren't making as much as they could be. That would be accurate. But the employees are making the money. A lot of cybersecurity companies still today run at a loss.

There’s No Innovation Since 2012

Eric: So, we've got all these dynamics in the market that make it a really hostile environment, when as a business owner, or a network, cybersecurity defender or whatever it may be, you're just trying to protect information. You're just trying to protect business. It's a tough space.

And it's equally as easy for the adversary. If they want to steal something, if they want to make money, it's a pretty low risk, not so hostile environment. It's perplexed. It's really why I stay here. I'm not an IT anymore. I'm not building things really. We're falling further and further behind. I think there's an answer, but we don't have it yet. And to me, that's the ultimate puzzle that maybe by the end of my life, I'll have some clues to how to solve it. Well, I'm certainly not solving it.

Carolyn: So, you said a couple of things that I want you to unpack a little bit for me. So, you said in cybersecurity, we don't consolidate. What would that look like if we did? And then, you said something that really got me. You said we don't innovate. Are you suggesting we haven't innovated since the sandbox in 2012?

Eric: I'm not, but I'm thinking about it in a maybe a different way.

We Haven’t Seen Consolidation

Carolyn: What would the consolidation look like?

Eric: So, there are four or 5000 companies, right? We haven't consolidated like most of IT, like most businesses do. Michael Porter talks about industry clustering, and we've seen clustering, but we haven't seen consolidation.

Mark: If we have, well, half a dozen. We have half a dozen kind of players in our market compared to the cybersecurity space, four or 5000 is crazy.

Eric: Pick any space and they're probably 10 to 20 larger organizations. And there are dozens to hundreds of startups. And I think the market drives in that direction with venture capital, the private equity, all the investment, all the hype. The fact that you can launch a product. I mean, Splunk, I don't remember when they even became profitable. They were operating at a major loss. Not to pick on Splunk, there are majority of companies who do this. And look at the stock price and look at how they took off because they were going for market share.

Here I am at the time 2010, I left McAfee in 2018, the beginning of it. We were profitable, I believe the whole time. Not an interesting company, didn't have the funding we wanted to innovate the way we wanted to. It wasn't interesting in the...

Jennifer Ewbank, Deputy Director for Digital Innovation at Central Intelligence Agency joins Carolyn and Mark to talk about the unparalleled work in integration and integration she and her teams are doing. Jennifer talks about the importance of partnerships in IT, data and cybersecurity and how Digital Innovations, the newest branch of the CIA, is transforming security.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:58] Jennifer’s Opinions on DDI’s Unparalleled Innovation
• [08:35] Integration of Digital Capabilities and Unparalleled Innovation
• [16:06] Unparalleled Innovation on Cloud Computing
• [24:04] Unparalleled Innovation in the Digital Landscape
• [32:00] Applying Unparalleled Innovation Into Our Mission
• [39:44] A Space Nerd With Unparalleled Innovation

Episode Links and Resources

• Jennifer Ewbank
• CIA.gov
• Full Digital Nation
• The Party
• 2034
• The Girl With Seven Names

Jennifer’s Opinions on DDI’s Unparalleled Innovation

Carolyn: Today, our guest is Jennifer Ewbank, Deputy Director of CIA for Digital Innovation, also known as DDI. Jennifer is responsible for accelerating the development and integration of digital and cyber capabilities across all of the CIA's mission areas. We're so excited to hear from you today, Jennifer, and get your opinions on the DDI and its contributions to the CIA.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for the invitation, I'm really excited about our conversation today. I love nothing more than sharing a little bit about the great work that the men and women of the CIA are doing on behalf of the American people. To talk about how this intelligence landscape is changing dramatically along with the digital transformation we see around the world.

We're here on the 1st of March. I wanted to acknowledge that, as we have a conversation today about one of these topics I love tremendously. It's really critically important for the intelligence business, it is taking place against the backdrop of events unfolding in Eastern Europe. So, just about a week ago, Russian troops invaded a sovereign nation and brought war back to the European continent in a completely unprovoked act.

I just wanted to assure anyone who might be listening to the podcast that the CIA is intensely focused on our national security around the world. We're focused on that crisis and working as part of an integrated US government team to do what we can to bring about a rapid end to these senseless hostilities and the return of Russian troops to the Russian Federation.Unparalleled Innovation on What Matters Most

Jennifer: I just wanted to ensure, whenever people listen to this, that they understand that we are focused on what matters most at the moment. I'm taking a few minutes out of an otherwise very hectic day to talk about this topic. It’s really important from a strategic perspective but is perhaps not the most urgent topic on our plates today.

Carolyn: Honestly, what you do is integral and so important to everything that you just mentioned. Let me see if I can get the words out right but in supporting the sovereign nation. What you do with the digital side of things and this mission, that cyber domain is incredibly important.

Jennifer: Yes, we've seen it play out a bit so far in unprovoked attacks on Ukrainian entities. Our role, sometimes, may not be known to those outside of the intelligence community and that's most of America. We work for the US government, we work for the US people, absolutely. But we also support our allies and partners around the globe. Any major challenge requires those partnerships to succeed. Anyway, that was my little PSA at the beginning.

Carolyn: Let's talk about your story. Let's talk more about your background, your role at the CIA. Describe the position and what the DDI is.

Jennifer: I can't imagine that most people would know what it is. I certainly knew very little about the CIA before joining it. Generally speaking, I lead the Directorate of Digital Innovation at CIA. It’s one of the five large directorates that comprise the whole of CIA. Some of these are going to be a lot more familiar to your audience and your listeners.

Intelligence Operations

Jennifer: The first is the Directorate of Operations. They conduct intelligence operations and information all around the globe. They work very closely with our partners and allies in all those countries.

Our Directorate of Analysis, they produce what we call all source analysis. Taking information from all over the place and weaving it together and producing objective analysis to inform policymakers about the key issues of the day and strategic issues. Our Directorate of Support is a truly extraordinary, probably an unparalleled innovation anywhere else organization. They do everything to keep this business running on a global scale.

So, it is HR, finance, logistics, medical services, anything you could possibly imagine and a global enterprise. Then we have our Directorate of Science and Technology which is probably our closest cousins in the organization. They develop technological capabilities to support our intelligence collection mission around the globe.

You might think of Q and Bond films but without as many high-speed chases or deadly firefights. Then there's DDI, the part that I oversee. If we think about the DS and T, our Directorate of Science and Technology, primarily focused on technology with a physical manifestation, we are that counterpart in the virtual or digital world. In essence, all the ones and zeros for the organization.

We are the agency's newest directorate and our mission spans are really broad spans. We've got data, data science, artificial intelligence, enterprise information technology, cyber security, cyber collection, cyber analysis and open source intelligence to support the CIA's mission in all aspects. We also have another really important role, we have established DDI University. That is a learning enterprise dedicated to raising the digital acumen of the CIA workforce as a whole.Leverage the Unparalleled Innovation

Jennifer: So that we actually have a workforce that's ready to leverage all of these capabilities, whether they're technological experts or not. In terms of my background, I did come to this role through a non-traditional path. My own career spans well over three decades. Initially, as a foreign service officer with the State Department serving overseas with our diplomatic corps. Then later, and for the bulk of this time with the CIA but in the Directorate of Operations.

That is the organization that is posted all around the globe, working with our foreign partners, collecting insights that we feed into our analytic products here in Washington. Prior to this current role, there were a couple of key roles, I think, were formative. They do inform how I approach this job. One was spending the majority of my time overseas and serving as a chief of station. That is the officer that's charged with leading these integrated teams in the field. I do have, let's say a favorite job. I'm not supposed to have favorite jobs but I do along the way.

One of those roles was working in Washington overseeing all of the CIA's engagements inside the United States. Think about all of our partnerships with intelligence community counterparts, with US government departments and agencies, and with academia. But most importantly, I think for our conversation today, with the US private sector and industry, finding those valuable partnerships for both sides.

It's only six years old at this point. The DDI, as you call it, is, I would say, changing the very way we approach the intelligence mission. We're focused on this deep and meaningful integration of digital capabilities across all of the CIA's mission areas.Integration of Digital Capability and Unparalleled Innovation

Jennifer: My role as deputy director of CIA for digital innovation is just that, the integration of digital capabilities across the entire mission. In that role, I have the opportunity, the pleasure of leading probably the most talented, creative and mission-focused workforce that I've ever seen.

Mark: You hit on a few things there. In a recent article that you did with the Cipher Brief, you mentioned how the DDI approaches partnerships with industry to create innovation hubs. Well, you didn't mention that but you talked a little bit about industry partnerships. Can you talk a little bit about how that partnership has helped contribute to the mission of partners harnessing data and artificial intelligence?

Jennifer: For context, and maybe this is implied in what I've said already, but DDI's work driving innovation and forging closer partnerships with industry is really essential to the future success of the CIA. Our focus continues to be on identifying those best in breed, cutting edge capabilities, commercially available solutions and exploring how we could rapidly leverage those to meet our evolving mission requirements.

There was a really great article on unparalleled innovation a few years ago in the MIT Sloan Management Review. It had an important line in there and it said, quote, long term organizational success depends on developing and implementing new ideas. It's funny because it's complete common sense. You would think, "Well, how is that not known?"

But in any large organization, I think, surprisingly, it's an easy thing to forget. For us, recent research that we've explored really identifies a need to find new ways to enable what has been called an adaptive space.

Networks and Organizational Structures

Jennifer: It’s thinking about networks and organizational structures that allow information, resources, and ideas to flow across in a way that can foster unparalleled innovation. For us, that often starts with small entrepreneurial teams and then later, bigger programs and structures.

That's what we're trying to do at DDI and that's one of the many areas where the industry is tremendously a helpful partner. Our outreach and connections with the industry are helping us do this. We’re finding new ways to bring in new ideas and rapidly put them in the hands of our officers to enable success in our mission.

We are partnering with companies in the industry to create the so-called adaptive spaces that allow us to rapidly experiment. To do so in a flexible, often unclassified, laboratory environment and that's what I mentioned about the innovation hubs. Those environments allow us to test out new ideas and capabilities to fail fast, to iterate, to rinse and repeat and innovate ultimately.

Artificial intelligence is a critical piece of that but I would say it's not the only one. It is an important one because industry's leading development is in that space. But our partnerships are more than, let's say, sharing the latest algorithm or model. Although that's important, it's also about working smarter and working side by side to create and deliver solutions to protect national security.

Just a last thing because I think it's an important disclaimer. DDI isn't alone in this, there are other elements of the agency that are working in these new spaces. Not long ago, we created CIA Labs which was a really exciting effort to reimagine how we engage with industry and national labs in particular.

We Are Home to Unparalleled Innovation

Carolyn: I love that quote from the article. To your point, it seems like it's a no-brainer. Yes, you've got to constantly be bringing in new ideas or, to quote my dad, there's more than one way to skin a cat. We have to remember that and it's so easy to forget. I love that your team, it sounds like, not only embraces this idea, but you're setting up these environments to foster and grow the ideas. It sounds like you're sandboxing.

Like you said, fail quickly, rinse and repeat, all of that in a very safe environment that can then go out. It brings me back to this point of all the mission areas. So, you're responsible for pushing out this digital innovation to all CIA mission areas. How do you see technology evolving in the CIA and government agencies overall? Six years your department's been around, right? What have you seen?

Jennifer: Certainly, we have been on this digital journey much like many other organizations. I like to think we're a little bit ahead of some in the government, though it's not a race. We just happened to get in the race a little bit earlier. Sit back just a little bit to say that one of our strengths as a country is that we are home to unparalleled innovation.

That is one of our greatest strengths as a nation, what industry brings and new capabilities. We were talking about phones earlier. I look no further than the phone in my handbag to see how technology has evolved dramatically in the past 10 years. Then think about where it's going to go in the next 10 years, it's almost unimaginable.How Technology and Unparalleled Innovation Is Evolving

Jennifer: I'll take one little slight tangent, when we're thinking about how technology is evolving, its use, its focus in government. I think it would be a real mistake and some people do this.

It would be a real mistake to think about this whole second machine age and digital transformation as some sort of a fancy modernization effort. I think about elastic cloud computing, big data, the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. These things are transforming the day-to-day life in America. In many ways, they're doing the same to the intelligence mission.

Our digital journey, as I said, it's well underway but we have a long way to go. I think the next few years are going to bring tremendous change. And so, I think about what's coming, this is my sense based on the work that we're doing. I see the maturation of AI capabilities across the intelligence community. With that, an ability to really harness the true power of data for us, we save for operational advantage and analytic insights.

I see AI and automation in particular taking routine tasks off our daily calendars. They’re freeing up time and mental energy for officers to devote to higher order cognitive functions. The things that only a human brain could do but are tied up with the drudgery of routine business. I see for us and many others the expanded use of augmented and virtual reality. If you think about the intelligence mission and what we're required to do all around the globe, different cultures, different languages, different environments, you name it, AR and VR can be really powerful tools in that mission.Unparalleled Innovation on Cloud Computing

Jennifer: Cloud computing, of course, continues to be the foundation on which we're building all of this. But by thinking about how things are changing, we're going to need to develop new, let's say, forms of edge computing. To enable this processing at the edge and, for us, the edge is global so that's a real challenge.

Another one that folks may not think about, but just as with any organization that is devoted to work all around the globe, further refining and building our natural language processing models is going to be really critical. Particularly, as we want to embrace this flood of open source information that's so readily available on the internet and you name it.

We're going to have to be able to collect it, translate it, structure it, tag it, filter it, prioritize it, add in your verb and do that all at scale and at machine speed. One of the last things I'll mention as an emerging area for us is digital twins. Thinking about all these other capabilities, digital twins might actually give us a really productive and cost-effective environment in which to experiment, innovate, fail, et cetera and do so in a safer environment.

Mark: What do you mean by digital twin? You mean like high availability backup?

Jennifer: I'm not a huge expert on this but setting up what's, in essence, a digital record of some other issue, event, place, you name it. Then using that in a sandbox environment to explore how you would really tackle this challenge.

Carolyn: When you do this digital twin stuff and even the sandboxing, this is a little bit of a tangent.

Metaverse

Carolyn: I'm fascinated by the metaverse coming online and augmented reality and virtual reality. Have you got to play with that?

Jennifer: I have played a little bit with VR, for sure. People are excited about showing off what they're doing. It has been eye-opening. You think about putting yourself in the position of another person's perspective. It's been powerful for lots of things. These are early days in the space. But it might put me in a different physical environment where I can become familiar with a different country, different environment, et cetera.

It's great for foreign language practice, that's great. It's interesting just in terms of the inclusive and positive management environment we want to create, it also has applications in that cross-cultural organizational way. Put yourself in the mindset, in the person of somebody that you're trying to understand, empathize, support. What is it like to be blind?

Mark: Or psychological.

Jennifer: What is it like to be deaf, to experience it as best you can? VR can do that. There’s one thing that I also want to mention, just because the CIA is unique in this area. I think it's valuable for our partners elsewhere to think about this. Just as we are focused on leveraging these new technologies and bringing them to our complex mission, we also do so against a backdrop of adversaries who are investing in the same technologies and deploying increasingly aggressive versions.

Think cyber-attacks that we see these days, think ransomware, think supply chain attacks. There are a lot of other actors out there who are leveraging these same capabilities and doing so in a way that is not in our national security interests.Monitor and Control an Unparalleled Innovation

Jennifer: There's a subset of these actors, whose governments I would characterize as digital autocracies. They're developing and deploying these capabilities first to monitor and control their own societies. Their own societies end up being the guinea pigs for this experimentation. Those capabilities can easily be projected around the globe at adversaries like us.

If I think about that balance for us, we need to leverage or, let's say, understand, deploy these capabilities to support our mission. We need to defend against their use by adversaries seeking to do us, the US, our...

Mike Gruss, Editor-in-chief at Sightline Media Group has eyes on news related to all things DOD. He and his reporters are asking the smart questions when it comes to government defense technology. IT savvy leadership, user experience, and gamification are just some of the topics Mike unpacks in this episode of Tech Transforms.

Episode Table of Contents

• [00:38] The Biggest Trending Topics in Government Technology
• [09:11] The Lethality of Government Technology
• [20:05] Predictions for Government Technology in 2022
• [31:22] How the Government Technology Is Put Together

Episode Links and Resources

• Mike Gruss
• Sightline Media Group
• DoD

The Biggest Trending Topics in Government Technology

Carolyn: Today we get to talk to Mike Gruss, editor-in-chief at Sightline Media Group. He’ll discuss some of the hottest topics in the IT industry. Sightline Media Group is the leading news organization covering military, defense, public sector, federal technology, C4ISR, and cyber defense. Today, Mike unpacks some of the biggest trending topics in government technology. We also get his perspective on the DoDs advancement in technology.

Mike, I love having you on the show because you have such a broad knowledge. You really have your finger on the pulse of what's happening in the government. So you're over a lot of publications. Can you tell our listeners briefly about your role as editor in chief of Sightline Media Group and the different publications you oversee?

Mike: Sightline oversees a number of brands, as you mentioned. I like to think of us as the largest national security newsroom in the country. We have two or three different buckets that our publications fall into. What we've really concentrated on the last year or so is working collaboratively across the newsroom. You may recognize specific brands, but I think our reporters are working across several brands or across the newsroom.

There's the military times brands, which are Military Times, Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times, and Marine Corps Times. Those are geared toward the troops and you'll see those publications, obviously online. They're available at commissaries, and then there's also our business to government groups.

What’s Happening With the Government Technology

Mike: Those are publications like defense news, which covers the defense industry and what's happening at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, the business and politics of defense acquisitions. And also C4ISR net, which focuses more on that network warfare aspect of the defense industry. The last publication we have is Federal Times. It focuses on the federal workforce and what they need and what's happening there on a day-to-day basis.

It's a lot, but we have a really passionate and skilled newsroom that thinks hard about these issues. They work really hard to get scoops up and to get enterprise news stories that will help people understand what's happening at their job and make better decisions every day at work.

Carolyn: I love the specialization. Obviously, you get a lot of stories that are going to be broad across. But when you take it and get specific to the mission of the different branches and the different missions, I really appreciate that.

Mike: I don't like to use the word expert because I think it's overused. But I'd say all of our reporters have a tremendous amount of knowledge in their field. They work really hard to ask smart questions, to be able to explain issues clearly and to know the nuances. I think that comes through in our reporting.

Carolyn: I definitely agree and I would absolutely use the word expert. Talk about your perspective on how the DoDs are making advancements in government technology. Do you think they're taking the right steps right now?

Mike: This is a difficult question and I think there's such a push-pull that we have to do here. I'm curious how you think of it too.

What DoD Has to Do With IT

Mike: On one hand, I think we have to recognize the complexity of what particularly DoD has to do when it comes to IT. They have to be the most secure, for example. If they are not secure, no one's going to give them a pass. No one's going to say, "Whoops, you missed that part. You didn't patch that, you didn't have that working. Oh, well."

That's not going to happen. We give them no leeway and that's how it should be. They have a tremendous budget to make sure they have no leeway. On the other hand, I get, I wouldn't say frustrated, but I think sometimes we're expected to celebrate advancements that industry made 10, 15 years ago.

Carolyn: Are you thinking of something specific?

Mike: I think cloud is the one that probably comes to mind first. But I think when you also talk about bringing your own device, you talk about even telework. These are things that many major corporations across the country figured these ideas out years and years ago. I think to say, "Well look at us. We did this." It's like, "Okay. You shouldn't get so much credit for doing it."

At the same time, I started with, there is that complexity of doing it at the size and scale they do it and with the level of security they do it. That's where I have this push and pull where I'm always careful of saying things like, "All right. This is a step forward for them, but are we judging them on the right scale?" I think that's where I sometimes have questions.

Mark: You bring up something really interesting. It brings to mind the executive order on user experience that's come out.

Executive Order

Mark: When I think of the DoD, I think of, "Okay. There's an element of the DoD that fights wars, protects the country. That's one element of it." But then there's the other element of luck. Making it easy for the people who work in the Department of Defense to actually live their lives, get healthcare, make sure that they're being paid. All these things seem to dovetail on that. I wanted to get your thoughts around that executive order. Are you guys tackling that at this juncture?

Mike: Yes, I think we're watching. I can't speak specifically to that executive order but I think those are the types of issues that we're constantly grappling with. And I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you that there's two separate schools of thought on IT in DoD. A couple of years ago, and you saw this, there was this, in the maddest era, everyone wanted to speak his language and use the same glossary of terms he did.

I very clearly remember being at a DISA event where someone said, "No. Sending an email promotes lethality." You're like, "Come on. Email is not lethal." Similarly, we have to draw the line. Yes, every little bit contributes to kinetic war operation, if you want to think about it that way. But I have a hard time pulling the thread that far where I'm like, "Okay. Email is lethality."

Mark: DoD looks at the world. You mentioned the commercial sector, which I've worked in both and I 100% agree with you. I think that the commercial world has adopted technologies much faster. They're ahead of the game. Of course, they also have employees, which the DoD has, which is their end-user.

The Lethality of Government Technology

Mark: Unless it's an enemy, then they're the end-user of lethality, so to speak. But in the commercial world, they do have customers that they have to cater to, which I think the DoD maybe has neglected.

Mike: Yes. Maybe to your point, it doesn't think of its employees as customers and that's probably one of the issues.

Carolyn: I've been learning recently about ATOs, Authority to Operate. In my brain, I thought an ATO got a stamp and they got to use the application. Like once they got the ATO, it's done. Not the case. I am baffled and the thought of what they have to go through on a regular basis to maintain that ATO, like thousands of hours per application is just unwieldy to me. It makes me sick to my stomach. I'm like, "That's about when I would quit," when I had to go through that ATO again. So they have that. I'd like to put you on the spot here a little bit. What has DoD excelled in that maybe the commercial world hasn't in technology?

Mike: That's a great question. I'm not sure. I'd be curious what you guys think of this too. There's part of me that thinks from a security standpoint that as much as that's an area where it slows them down and they're critiqued for, I think in many instances they seem to have gotten it right. So let's take, for example, Solar Winds. There was a vulnerability there and it seems from what we know, and obviously, I don't know everything. But from what I've read and what our reporters have said, other government agencies were hurt or were more vulnerable.

Who Have Been Hit With Vulnerability

Mike: DoD seems to have been done okay there. They knew there were attempts. But it seems like everything that's been said publicly, and the best that our reporters can tell is that because of the strength of their network, they were able to withstand this. I think there's part of me that is skeptical like, "Well wait a minute. What did you guys do differently than everyone else did?" But we also have to give them credit for that. We look at the companies across the world that were hit with that vulnerability.

Mark: I think that bar is so high. There's no alternative. It's table stakes. They had to do it right. Maybe they suffered in some ways, adaptability or agility, but they had to deliver on it. My gut feeling would tell me, and I don't know this. I'm speculating like most of us that the ability to wage war is an area where technology is something they do well. But that doesn't necessarily help a lot of the day-to-day IT workings of the Department of Defense.

Carolyn: But what I hear you saying is the mission of the DoD is to protect and defend and they excel at it. I like that.

Mike: To use Mark's word and I think he's absolutely right there, the agility. There is a trade-off, you can't have it both ways. You can't excel in this area and also there's zero room for error. There is a trade-off. I think maybe what the conversation that's happening now is that trade-off, are those trade-offs kind of balanced or aligned the way that they should be?

Zero Trust and Thunderdome

Mark: I'm a great straight man. So speaking of zero trust, can you give us your thoughts on zero trust and maybe even touch on the Thunderdome?

Mike: Yes. I think the Thunderdome Award is interesting from DISA, but I guess I have a couple of questions. We see these, and I'm coming off way more skeptical than I really am doing this podcast. I think that's the rolling plan. We see these cybersecurity philosophies come up every couple of years. I'm blanking on the name, but the risk framework we heard about a couple of years ago, I think all these ideas evolved. We're not too far away from where we were maybe five or 10 years ago, but this is just the most natural evolution of that.

I think, as a late person and so many of these ideas I relate back to my home or my own personal security. I'm like, "Oh, well this makes sense that this is how zero trust operates. I don't want someone else speaking to my bluetooth speaker that's on right now." And I don't want to say its name or I don't want someone else turning on the lights in my house or something. That all makes sense, someone accessing my bank account.

I guess the couple of questions I have right now are like, how will this work in the future? How will it work with legacy systems? As we have these legacy systems throughout DoD, I guess one, will they be able to be upgraded to work with the zero trust architecture? Two, how will they do that and, again, what's the trade-off there? How much are you going to pay?How Much Work Is Going to Take To Build Government Technology

Mike: How much work is that going to take to make sure that every element of a new destroyer works with that zero trust architecture? I think that's difficult. The other question I have is we're obviously moving into this new world where everything's connected and the program is called JADC2.

But this sensor to shooter where you use any sensor in the world connected to any shooter in the world, how does zero trust architecture work with that? How does it work with international alliances? I feel like they're big ideas, but again, this is something where zero trust only works if it's working with everyone. So I feel like there's still a lot of room for explanation and improvement. It seems like it's the right path for now and getting everyone on board and making it kind of the universal approach.

It’s what we've seen the last what, 12, 18 months. Maybe there's been more concerted effort during that time to get everyone on the same page here. It feels like this is the way that it's going to go and this is the way it's going to work. Not just DoD, but also industry is kind of on board with this idea, which is what you need.

Mark: Feels that way to me too.

Mike: Maybe in the next two or three years, we'll see the next evolution of whatever this is and we'll be talking about something else.

Mark: It feels to me that cyber security generally is a weapon system that needs to be invested in like you would invest in warfare capabilities like the F35. It needs that type of investment.

Politics or Scare Tactics

Mark: Certainly, it seems like, and I don't know how much this is politics or scare tactics or what, but that our adversaries are looking at it that way. Using it as a means to disrupt what we do and take our eye off the ball, wherever that may be going. It just feels that way.

I also feel like zero trust is a current path that should change. This should all change every couple of years. Certainly, the landscape is changing so fast. It can't be something that we say, "This is what we're going to do for the next 15 years."

Carolyn: So Thunderdome, aside from being an awesome name, to be honest is a little perplexing to me. Maybe I've just been in this industry too long, but I feel like we've been talking about zero trust for a decade. It's been a big push for the DoD for at least five years. When I read about Thunderdome, the way I understand it is we're going to build out a prototype. I thought we already had that. So I'm a little confused. I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

Mike: I think the most recent word was more for specific prototypes involving specific technologies. I would say generally the idea has been out there. It's been adopted and we've seen it be a top priority for the IT leaders. I think maybe now some of the questions are, how do you implement that philosophy? What are the tools in place to make sure that everything is working as expected? That's how I'm reading some of these more recent contract announcements in this area.

Predictions for Government Technology in 2022

Carolyn: That actually helps me. I would love to get your predictions. So what are your predictions for government technology in 2022?

Mike: I thought a little bit about this and you can tell, some are more surprising than others. The first one is, I think we're going to see IT savvy leaders, and that doesn't necessarily mean just IT leaders. IT savvy leaders are going to have a bigger seat at the table or will be invited to the table where maybe they weren't in the past. I think that's something that's been happening the last couple of years, but that's going to continue to evolve at a faster and faster rate.

Carolyn: Are you thinking more of DoD specifically or is this across the government?

Mike: I think it's probably happening across the government. I spend most of my time on DoD issues. I'd say what's going to happen, but let me give you an example. I was at a breakfast in October and there was a general officer. Someone who's been around for a while and been promoted a number of times. He said, "Only in the last six months did I fully understand what data as ammunition means." I thought, "Wow. How could you have only heard or really grasped that in the last six months?"

I've covered national security for about 10 years. I feel like that's been an idea the entire time. That's why I say IT savvy leaders who have really adopted and embraced the data first mentality, I think they will get promoted more and have a seat at the table. Whereas maybe folks who are a little more, I don't know if the right word is data hesitant, not data curious, won't.Government Technology Faces a Little Language Barrier

Carolyn: Do you think that it might be a semantic thing? We've got a little language barrier going on because our DoD leaders, like Intel, are king. I think that they would all agree with that, and data is Intel. Is it a language barrier?

Mark: Or is it culture?

Mike: It's probably a lot of both. I don't think the culture has been there. When people say data they're like, "Oh, I'm not an IT person or I'm not this person." I just think that's not the way the world works anymore. Like everyone's a data person.

Mark: Do you see any shift in that culture of late? A lot of the military shifts seem like every 18, 24 months and have new jobs. Maybe IT is not a place where that should be done. Do you see any of that?

Mike: I see it evolving the last couple of cycles to use the idea you're talking about. It feels, from where I sit, that there's been some more savvy folks, but not just in the IT departments or not the IT like the CIO's offices. I’d say it's across the board that we're seeing. My prediction is I expect that to continue to happen faster and faster. I think the other thing that's related to that I expect to see less of is, I just wrote down patience with IT.

So I expect that when there are problems, there's not going to be the folks who do so much of that now. I don't know if you guys followed this, but last week there was a letter from an air force officer that went viral. The hashtag was “fix our computers”.

Money, Time, and Red Tape in Government Technology

Mike: I hope I got that right. It’s all about how much money, time, and red tape is being wasted just because basic functions don't work. If you're seeing that type of very public outburst, I don't say that pejoratively, the complaints were merited. But if you're seeing that happen at the officer level from folks who are running tech incubators, imagine what's happening by folks who don't feel empowered to speak out. I think the patience there is very thin.

Senior leaders are going to say, "We just can't operate this way anymore." I don't want to put too much weight on it, but you saw the air force CIO. You saw other CIOs weigh in on LinkedIn and say, "You're absolutely right. We got to fix this. Here's some of the steps we're taking." If that conversation becomes public in that way, I think the patience may be worn out.

Mark: It's an interesting perspective. I didn't think of it that way.

Carolyn: They're demanding a user experience. I just saw a tweet from Nick Chaillan that said, "Would it be faster to list everything that is not broken?" No.

Mike: I think he was part of this. We've seen it with some of the Navy IT leaders...