Underpinning Homeland Infrastructure

During her tenure as Acting DHS CIO, Margie Graves has a lot of irons in the fire – starting with Networx.

Networx is a very key component of the DHS acquisitions strategy and has been since 2005 when the Department first launched its infrastructure transformation program said Graves.

“We wanted to make sure we were a key player at the table in terms of the development of the requirements for the Networx contract. We assigned our senior infrastructure officer to play on that team and make sure that we brought all our requirements to the table,” said Graves.

“Since then we have been first to the table in developing our own fair opportunity, so we were the first ones to execute on that. Our components right now are working through adding additional modifications to the contract to address specifics that are inherent in our environment.”

That environment is changing rapidly as “DHS is collapsing 24 data centers into two; those two data centers are set up for infrastructure as a service (IaaS),” said Graves. ““The contracts support that and that is the model that we are going to use over time. We have our CIOs working to develop the common operating environment.  In the future new applications being developed we are going to try to move those directly into that new environment.”

Legacy Systems Meet Web 2.0

“Of course there’s an issue with taking the legacy systems and moving them into that environment, which is one of the difficulties. Because we have a lot of different types of technology as you can imagine that would be coming in and a lot of those would be reengineered and re-platformed before they can enter into that environment. We are set up to do that.”

Graves said for DHS networks they have adopted a common NPLS architecture and a common provisioning system and that DHS is working very diligently to make sure that all of our traffic is monitored by a common Network Operating Center capability.

Graves noted that while DHS is using some of the commercially available Web 2.0 capabilities, they are also developing Web 2.0 technology within federal agencies. “One that’s happened within DHS and is featured on the White House website is called ‘idea patterning’.”

“It came from TSA and essentially it started out as a blog type capability for employees to put forward ideas on improvement in operations and efficiencies of TSA; then each of the individuals out in the community within TSA was allowed to build on those ideas, vote on those ideas. The ones that became ubiquitous and supported and expanded were the ones that were considered by the leadership for actual implementation.”

This has been such a success that DHS is looking for ways to push the capability out to DHS as a whole. “We are really proud of the way that we have pulled that together; so much so that the deputy secretary is having a meeting to push that out across DHS as a whole.”

The Culture Card

One of the major challenges facing DHS on a day to day basis is trying to move to the future optimized network structure – a challenge that is more cultural than technical.

“The challenges that we face are dramatically cultural,” said Graves.  “So it’s very important that you build a trust within your community in order to have a major transition to a common infrastructure.”

The way DHS is doing that is through the utilization of the DHS CIO Council with every component at the table.

“We get to the point where we roll up our sleeves and we have some very distinctly open conversations about the standardizations aspects; how we are going to access data; what the infrastructure and the architecture is going to look like, what the business model is going to be, how we are going to go after funding,” said Graves.

And while it is important to have cooperation at the CIO level, much of the work is done by groups such as the DHS Enterprise Architecture Board.

“We set the primary IT strategy for the entire agency and we do that with the CIOs. But then subsequently the Board, which also includes component representation, goes and determines what the solutions will look like.”

As to where this is all heading Graves said jokingly said she wants to get out of the infrastructure business. “I want to get to the point where the CIOs are concentrating on their mission applications, and concentrating on the delivery of the data to people who need it at the correct time.”

“I think one of the reasons that 9/11 happened was because we weren’t effectively information sharing across departments and within departments even,” Graves added.

“So our play in this is all about the data -- securing at the data layer, having data standards, moving information as quickly as we possibly can. It’s particularly important in our business that we support the state and local law enforcement structure and that we have them as a partner in our protection of the homeland. That is one of our Secretary’s priorities.”

Graves said DHS is moving towards using resources effectively to deliver those types of business applications that will help us move towards standards while providing infrastructure as a service and as a commodity.

“We want to make use of the full portfolio of the technologies that are available to us and it is a really exciting time to be standing on the precipice of what’s out there because it’s going to change the way we do business.”

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August 24, 2009 • Volume 7 • Number 5
 

Focused On The Future; Still Tied To The Past

Networx is playing a key role in modernizing government infrastructure.

Karl Krumbholz is GSA’s director of Network Services. His team manages the Networx contract, which is in the process of transitioning agencies from the soon to expire FTS 2001 contracts.

But even as Krumbholz focuses on transition, which is calls his “top priority”, he has his eyes on the future.

“We are focused on adding new services to our contracts to address the evolving needs of our agency customers and to meet government mandates,” said Krumbholz.

“For example, GSA has added the new managed trusted internet protocol service, which we call MTIPS, to both Networks Universal and Enterprise. This service fully responds to the OMB trusted internet connections mandate and provides an easy cost effective alternative for agencies to meet the OMB TIP requirement. Today the MTPS has been modified into the AT&T, Qwest and Verizon business Networks Universal and Enterprise contracts, and the Sprint Enterprise contract.”

Krumbholz said to make it easier for agencies to realize the benefits of voice over IP technologies, GSA is modifying the Networx VoIP service to include a managed LAN component. “Agencies will be able to deploy VoIP over a separate LAN without having to fully converge their voice and data services. With this new feature, agencies will also be able to add video teleconferencing and unified messaging.”

To assist agencies in transition, GSA is offering additional GSA support to agencies that need assistance in meeting transition deadlines. “We are offering agencies contracting, requirements development, and transition implementation assistance and are offering to complete all transition activities for very small agencies. We are continuing our focus in measuring progress through the agency transition working group,” Krumholz announced.

Part of looking to the future is embracing Web 2.0 and social networking technologies. In the area of Web 2.0 services, GSA has signed an agreement with Facebook, My Space, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube and is in discussions with many other providers that offer new media services.

GSA recently launched the official government YouTube channel, updated the presence on Facebook and gained an audience of more than 4000 followers on Twitter. The government YouTube channel launched more than 200 videos from 25 agencies according to Krumbholz.

This venture into social networking serves another purpose.

“What we find from our perspective the greatest challenges are not technology. We find that our industry providers respond whenever we can come to an agreed requirement,” says Krumbholz.

Therein lies the challenge; large government agencies are multilayered with sub agencies and bureaus and divisions that have a distinct missions and may even have their own budget authority. To get somebody to take responsibility or to be the one that owns that requirement is often difficult.

“As we see it that’s probably the biggest challenge,” noted Krumbholz. He says for GSA as a service provider, the challenge is to standardize common government requirements for infrastructure in order to leverage industry competition and achieve government wide best value.

Traditionally the network services infrastructure requirements and governance structure has been under the Interagency Management Council said Krumbholz.

“This council has in the past, and continues to be our primary governance organization and includes representatives from 21 of the largest government agencies. It was instrumental in molding the requirements for FTS 2000, FTS 2001, and Networx and continues to be the voice of the customer for Network services for GSA.”

Recent changes to the IMC charter have broadened its scope beyond networks services to include IT services requirements, and GSA has increased participation to include more senior officials who are helping GSA understand from a broader perspective what the agencies’ technology needs are.

For the future Krumholz envisions agencies moving more and more towards managed services. “We’ve seen that just observing trends across the agencies with more agencies focusing on their mission and getting out of the business of managing their networks infrastructure,” said Krumbholz.

“Speaking of the government networks infrastructure, while the challenges associated with the organizational issues may need to be overcome, we certainly think that a secure integrated interoperable government infrastructure is an achievable goal,” Krumbholz asserted. “Reducing costs and increasing security will be driving factors that eventually move us in that direction.”

Meanwhile GSA will continue to facilitate the migration of broadband services that agencies simply can’t procure at the wall plate said Krumbholz as they move towards that more secure interoperable government infrastructure both now and in the future.

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Dynamic Infrastructure

Virtualization technologies are optimizing infrastructure, separating the application from the underlying infrastructure. No longer does a one-to-one server relationship necessary. In fact, the technology is enabling according to Gary DePreto from Cisco.

But while technology is important, it is not the only dynamic at work. “At Cisco, we study the future of work and the future of connected life. As the Gen Y category enters the general workforce, their expectation is really driving a lot of our applications and the use of Web 2.0 technology.”

DePreto says if you look at what is in the public domain with things like the explosion of Facebook -- clearly a popular web 2.0 experience -- it is an open standard application.

“When we bring it inside the enterprise, we have a trusted relationship with those Web 2.0 technologies and that is the opportunity and the challenge for all of us,” said DePreto. “Cisco needs to maintain a thought leadership position, so we are of course early adopters of a lot of these concepts and a lot of technologies. We have a concept that we share with the federal customers called Cisco on Cisco. And that’s best practices that we’ve done as an early adopter with things like tele-presence, for example.”

What that covers is how you implement that within an organization, what are the metrics, how do you measure, what are the benefits to the business and what is the value to your end customers said DePreto. “That is the thought leadership where it is our business to be part of that front end early adoption and share those experiences with the federal government.”

Changing Process

“There’s something really subtle and the idea actually very powerful,” said DePreto, “and this isn’t just about Web 2.0 technology, this is a whole business process change.”

So, at Cisco there are work groups coming together with subject matter expertise, solving an issue and then that group may get disbanded and come together at a later stage according to DePreto.

“That’s the nature of work today and Web 2.0 really enables that business process change. So that’s the power of it, that’s the excitement of it and with that comes the challenge of governance and how do we manage that new world. And we really have to transition into a paradigm shift in which governance and policy, historically you think of control.”

When it comes to the future of government infrastructure, DePreto talks about how when Cisco goes after any opportunity, there are three things needed: establish a vision, develop a strategy and implement an execution plan.

“I think when we are transforming government infrastructure we take a similar approach and I’ll give you an example,” said DePreto.

“We have to start with the end user experience, and one example Cisco has is connective health care. What we have done is started with the end user experience -- in this case perhaps a soldier --and how that battlefield triage takes place; what are the touch points in order to be able to support that environment and transporting that patient to Germany perhaps; what is the next stage of health care back home here at Walter Reed; what is the next stage and then ongoing care with the Veteran’s Administration.”

DePreto said Cisco would map that out in the form of an end user experience, an end user vision, and then drop that down to a strategy. “What is the technology strategy to support the care of that patient? So that’s just one example which we call connective care. You start with a vision, you build a technology strategy and that allows you to drive the requirements.”

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Technologies For Transition

Providing the technologies that help enable the transition of government have been what Citrix has concentrated on during its 20 year history.

“What we are looking to do is help organizations optimize their current networks better and leverage their existing infrastructure and transform that infrastructure into an architecture where service delivery is the bottom line,” said Citrix's David Smith.

Virtualization and cloud computing play a key role because all of the different types of devices and IT infrastructure that exist throughout government.  

“Virtualization plays a huge role in that because you are trying to get away from the tight coupling of equipment to business functions,” Smith explained. You are really limiting your flexibility when you have a specific piece of infrastructure tied to a specific functional role, whereas virtualization can enable you to gain agility by being able to dynamically reallocate resources to new projects by being able to do something different with the new infrastructure.”

Smith asserted that Web 2.0 is changing the model of computing. “We are getting away from the model of pushing information to people and expecting them just to have it there and use it. We are looking at an advertise subscribe model where users can go out and pick the things that they need and be able to pull that information to them, rather than them being force fed things down their own pipe.”

With the effect of increasing consumerization of IT, there are lots of different types of devices that are coming into government networks Smith went on. “The challenge is that existing infrastructures aren’t necessarily built to handle all these things. So we need to look for new ways to leverage existing infrastructures and new ways of delivering applications.”

The other challenge is an agency can’t optimize by replacing everything, because no one has the funds to replace all existing infrastructure to build a new infrastructure. “You have to look at being able to leverage the existing infrastructure, optimize current networks versus buying more bandwidth and leveraging existing servers better versus buying more servers and more infrastructure.”

Smith said the last challenge revolves around policy. “Especially when we get into areas of cloud computing and Web 2.0, where does the data live, who owns the data, who hosts the data and can I outsource certain services, or what services do I have to keep because I need to own the data?”

The mission has to drive the technology especially when it comes to standards.  “The number one thing is we are looking at are industry partnerships and standards that exist out there; looking at how we can adopt those standards and work with industry partners to develop new standards so that as government makes choices in technology the technologies that they choose will all work well together.”

That means adopting open architectures that allow for easy integration of different technologies to work together.

“You have organizations like NIST that are out there creating standards and so we are collaborating with organizations like NIST to make sure that their standards take into consideration the newest technologies and the latest and greatest what technology can do,” said Smith.

In the future, Smith says Citrix believes that the evolution of IT will be driven by a movement away from what we know today as the distributed computing model and more to an enterprise IT architecture --a service oriented architecture (SOA) which simplifies the overall delivery of information to the end user.

“The utility example is a great example. By drawing an analogy to a satellite TV provider, the satellite TV provider is looking at controlling the information that’s provided to the end TV. They don’t ask you what type of TV you have, they say which services do you need and they turn on those services,” said Smith.

Largely a lot of the services they provide are not even services that they generate. They are third parties that are delivering HBO.

“If I draw that analogy to the cloud, a lot of what we are seeing in the cloud is they are going to be third parties that provide information that we need to deliver to the end user. So you need to be able to control at the head end how you deliver information to the end users. But then you need to look at being as agnostic as possible to the types of devices and locations where you are going to be delivering information, because it is only going to get more complex,” said Smith.

“You are only going to have more device types and different user scenarios that you have to deliver information to. So being able to centralize control and optimize are all key components of what the future architecture is going to look like.”

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Is Email Quaint?

A lot of what is going on today in modernizing infrastructure has to do with shared infrastructure (e.g. cloud computing).

“When you think about the movement towards cloud, when you think about the movement towards virtualization, when you think about consolidation, what you are really talking about is moving towards a shared environment,” said EDS’s Mike Donovan.

And that raises questions.

“How do you keep the existing programs or records separate? How do you take the legacy information that’s there when it moves around the network in a virtual world, establish the channels of communication across the shared network infrastructure so that all of the information flows seamlessly across this environment?” Donovan posed.

“A lot of it is about understanding how the legacy works, taking new technologies that enable us to establish that separation, and then manage the flow of traffic between the various components of the application?”

Look at the workforce that’s coming into government today and most will look at email and give you a strange look when you give them an email account and say “how quaint”.

They are used to living on Facebook; they live on Twitter; they live on all of these kinds of systems. “So we have to work with the government agencies to make sure that the new workforce is supported by the tools that come in. One of the challenges that we find is that you get so many of these tools. I was struck by the length of the list that you can get,” said Donovan.

What this all leads to according to Donovan is there is all of this information spread across all of these different systems. And you need to find a way to pull it together in a coherent way.

One of the things that EDS (an HP Company) has done internally is created something called the water cooler said Donovan. It draws information from all of these different systems and then correlates it with EDS’ internal corporate directory so staff can find who is working on what and who has posted blogs on certain subjects, so they can easily find subject matter experts.

Looking into the future Donovan thinks that everything will be called “Something as a Service”.

“You talk about infrastructure as a Service, you talk about business function as a service, you talk about information as a service, but how do we get there from here?,” asked Donovan.

“You really have to look at the supporting infrastructure as a utility platform on which you can build programs, on which you can build mission packages.”

The first thing people have to do is “let go” said Donovan. “and to get around the cultural barrier that says it’s mine and allow people to think about it as a utility.”

“Then you can start building virtual communities, virtual missions, virtual agencies on top of that and so you combine the stuff in the public sector, the stuff in the private sector, the private to government, you take hybrid combinations of both of those and you start using platforms of opportunity and networks of opportunity and then virtualize the information on top of that and let it flow.”

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