July 21, 2006 • Volume 4 • Number 10

Infrastructure optimization and consolidation. They may not sound sexy, but they are the key drivers to running cost effective, not costly IT government infrastructures in the future.

At the Federal Executive Forum, leaders who are on the front lines of this movement discussed the challenges and opportunities. On the panel were: Charlie Havekost, the CIO of HHS, Hord Tipton, the CIO at the Department of the Interior, Mark Day, the CTO at EPA, John Johnson, Assistant Commissioner of GSA, Mary Ellen Condon, Vice President, Deputy Director at SRA Orion Center for Homeland Security, and Steve Picot, the federal area manager for advanced technology data center at Cisco Systems.

Steve Picot
Federal Area Manager Advanced Technologies -  Data Center 
Cisco Systems.

Below are Steve Picot's comments.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP:

Steve Picot at Cisco, I would imagine that this is a major priority for you too as you look at deploying networks you always want to be seen as having a quality service anyway and with quality the security comes along with that. Can you comment on the security issues that go along with consolidation?

STEVE PICOT, CISCO SYSTEMS:

With the network comes great responsibility and the network has typically been the entry point for some of the worst denial of service and virus attacks we’ve seen in the last few years. The Ninja virus was a classic example. About a year of productivity was lost collectively in the US from that and recovering from that. Let me give you an example of a solution to that.

We were asked by DOD about a year and a half ago to look at their coalition information sharing environment, they were spending a tremendous amount of capital on building multiple redundant and in many cases parallel networks to support these coalition environments that are involved in a lot of our current war operations. Cisco got together with industry partners, like Microsoft and EMC to develop  applications that encrypt data and put together a reference architecture that not only works on a perfect world scenario, but you can roll into an existing scenario and add defense in depth; things like Mary Ellen brought up, role based access controls, the ability to secure mobile devices as well as data centers and we’ve had this thing in place for about a year and a half now at central command and have just gone through a first round of ethical hacking and we passed with flying colors.

So I think that there’s very much the capability in the industry right now to go into legacy environments and apply some best practices and have a very secure environment both from a data at rest perspective as well as people roaming around with laptops.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP:

Steve Picot, how does a company like Cisco approach infrastructure optimization and consolidation? Are you following the customer lead or do you have things that you are doing as a company to try and get out in front of this to come up with creative ideas?

STEVE PICOT, CISCO SYSTEMS:

That’s a good question Jim. We make a big point of innovating in the sense of we try to do everything to ourselves first, if you will, prior to talking to our customers about it. Cisco itself, from an IT perspective, has consolidated a very large enterprise down to just three data centers as well as providing real time replication, we’ve experimented with mobile devices and security, challenges that are associated with those, as well as just general network security when you have a local organization that’s highly web related.

Some of the points we heard earlier around consolidation involve the proverbial putting your eggs in one basket. This brings up any network security challenges, brings up separation of data challenges because people simply don’t want their data in the same physical space as someone else’s. Secure information sharing as well as supporting initiatives like telework and continuity of government operations.  So the network is the ubiquitous piece of everybody’s enterprise and so our job is to make that more functional, more secure and aligned with some of these initiatives that we have been discussing here today.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP:

Steve Picot, I imagine Cisco has been involved in many, many programs and projects along these lines. What are some of the challenges you see and ways to overcome them?

STEVE PICOT, CISCO SYSTEMS:

I think we are developing a theme here. Obviously cultural and process issues are always a barrier when we come in with a technology solution, so Mary Ellen’s point. If the leadership of that organization is not prepared to, and the classic paradigm would be the ERP system, where an ERP system rolls in with best practices for work flow but an organization will then thwart that by modifying that to fit their older and in many cases more inefficient work flow.

That’s a case of process and culture beating technology and they win almost every time. Another thing is looking at areas of consolidation as an opportunity to move to efficiency. So in a case like a large organization or something like HHS where you are trying to consolidate numerous silos into 2 or 3 more secure information sharing organizations, you again run into the cultural issues because as I said earlier, it’s the I don’t want my stuff on their box comes into play.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP:

What are your thoughts on the future of infrastructure consolidation? 

STEVE PICOT, CISCO SYSTEMS:

It’s clear that industry and government need to stay in lock step and technology leaders need to understand where the developments are and industry needs to be proactive in bringing those solutions to the government. We can’t just jump on the fire of the moment.