JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP:

Talking about industry, Mary Ellen Condon from SRA, Mary Ellen, how does SRA approach large infrastructure consolidation projects?

MARY ELLEN CONDON, SRA:

Thank you Jim for the opportunity to be here with your fellow panelists. SRA approaches it from the business perspective of the client. In other words, the most important part of infrastructure optimization and consolidation is service delivery. So understanding the business goals of the organization, the delivery, who their customers are, and what are the most important things are an element of that strategic plan.

And as you lay it out over time you bring in processes and tools that are standards based to provide the flexibility to do this incremental growth as well as to always be enhancing and improving service delivery.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP:

We were exploring the idea of the challenges and the difficult challenges we are trying to overcome when trying to establish infrastructure optimization. Let’s start from the industry viewpoint. Let’s start with Mary Ellen this time. Mary Ellen what do you think are some of the most difficult challenges that you need to overcome to achieve infrastructure consolidation and optimization?

MARY ELLEN CONDON, SRA: 
 

Thank you for that question, that easy question Jim. If only it were that easy. The initial challenge is communications and understanding the culture of the organization and what they are trying to accomplish, because optimization for optimization sake is not going to sell.

What is the mission delivery that we are trying to accomplish? Then as you lay that out, there is an incremental process to get there. And then finally what Charlie was talking about before is going with COTS and that means using standards. (They) are very important in providing that flexibility and growth capability over time and to maximize the ability to utilize good costs when it becomes available. So that’s how we try to structure our approach and have had success doing that.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP:

We need to switch over and talk about that security and resilience issue that have been brought up by a number of folks and their comments. Let’s get firstly an industry view point.

Mary Ellen, you had a reputation in the security field when you were in government and still carry that strong reputation, so the security issue is one you’ve been around. How do you look at when you trying to have these various missions and different functional areas with law enforcement and perhaps intelligence related, administrative traffic, and now you are going to consolidate them on one network? How do you approach that in security concerns?

MARY ELLEN CONDON, SRA:

Thanks for that question and yes, security is one of my passions. I think much of the comments today support the fact that there is good planning and good understanding in the business mission of the organization. And what really needs to be protected and how it needs to be protected. So number one is integrating your security strategy at the very beginning into your overall plan. As we use standards and COTS, we actually make it easier to have a secure environment. Customization often causes problems, unintended but it often causes security glitches.

The other thing is you use some of the classic things, compartmentalization when it’s appropriate, role-based access, but all of those features are easier to deploy and for the user to use in a structured environment, in which they understand the levels of service they are getting and how it’s being delivered. And together all these things provide a much better level of service and more secure, never perfect, but more secure to the end user.

JIM FLYZIK, THE FLYZIK GROUP: 

What do you see in the future for infrastructure consolidation?
 

MARY ELLEN CONDON, SRA:

I see this process as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary process, it makes it more important that standards and governance and flexibility and integration of these things be an ongoing thing, it’s not a one time experience.