Jane Edwards
Robert Carey, president of Cloudera Government Solutions and a previous Wash100 Award winner, said he believes cyber is the primary challenge facing federal agency chief information officers and chief information security officers when it comes to managing and securing data in a hybrid cloud environment.
“So to wrap a coherent security architecture around the disparate views is very helpful for the CISOs and the CIOs today and so that’s really I think is the number one struggle,” he told FedScoop in an interview posted Friday.
“The second struggle is do I know what data I have, do I know who’s accessing it … and can I in fact control that and manage it,” added Carey, who is also vice president of Cloudera public sector.
He also highlighted the need for federal officials to understand the data and applications as they support the agency’s mission.
“It’s non-trivial to really mesh the agency’s mission to its data strategy. It’s not just data architectures but it is where is it, how it is protected, how old is it … those kinds of things all meshed around together and then you think over the next three or four years and you try to line up with where is technology going because the tools that existed for example when JEDI was conceived, are not the tools that exist today,” Carey noted.
Carey said agencies could use existing tools to analyze data in the context of their mission.
“You can determine from queries what is the data that’s most meaningful and trusted moving into the future. There is some data that you don’t move everything to the cloud. You move the things that you need in the cloud,” he noted. “Agencies must conduct an examination of the environment at a pretty grand level of detail to be able to then discern what’s coming forward and what’s not.”
He also discussed the importance of the “whole management of the data lifecycle” and how it could benefit agencies as they work to derive insights from data and make it useful for artificial intelligence and automation.
