Keith Trippie, Executive Director for the Enterprise System Development Office (ESDO), Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
As Executive Director for ESDO, Trippie is responsible for overseeing the department’s cloud strategy and enterprise application service offerings. He is best known for leading the Department of Homeland Security’s move to cloud services. Trippie identified early on the promise of leveraging cloud solutions for greater efficiencies. As a result, the DHS was the first agency to make an award under the General Services Administration’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) contract. Today, DHS has a model in place that other agencies are replicating. Now that’s something to be proud of! Not one to sit on his laurels, Trippie continues to oversee a broad range of technology initiatives that enable a mobile workforce, enhance information sharing, and reduce time to market for new services.
Robert Hughes, CIO, Department of the Treasury, Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)
The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), under the United States Department of the Treasury recently reduced the cost, time, and effort typically required to refresh desktop and laptop computers by implementing a cutting-edge Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) program.
According to Robert J. Hughes, Chief Information Officer/Assistant Administrator (Information Resources) for the TTB, the way his team had been updating computing systems was cumbersome and expensive. It required a personal touch to update hardware and software. With 80 percent of TBB employees working remotely, Hughes needed an easy way to update systems without having to physically touch the hardware. The answer was to eliminate hard drives and create a virtualized environment. With this new virtualized approach, Hughes realized $1.2 million dollar in savings for his agency.
Hughes shares his story with Federal Technology Insider in this exclusive podcast.
Anil Karmel, Deputy CTO, National Nuclear Security Administration
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has always been a forward-thinking agency when it comes to cloud computing and BYOD efforts. So when NNSA recently rolled out its own cloud computing environment to manage data more securely, efficiently, and effectively, we wanted to learn more. Federal Technology Insider sat down with Deputy CTO of NNSA, Anil Karmel, to get the full scoop on the YOURcloud initiative.
Karmel saw real value to leveraging the cloud. “In an era of declining budgets, cloud computing can offer greater security at a lower cost, if approached correctly. The first step in this journey is to understand what the cloud is and what it means to your organization,” Karmel told Federal Technology Insider during our interview.
NNSA began its journey to the cloud seven years ago when they implemented on-premise server virtualization. After achieving a positive ROI within nine months of project inception, they evolved their investment into a secure, private cloud. Today, YOURcloud is the federal government’s first secure, hybrid community cloud, brokering on-premise and commercial cloud service providers via a unified control plane.
Read the full Q&A here.
Joe Klimavicz, CIO, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration embraced a shared services model for cost savings and efficiency long before the model became popular and a widespread federal strategy. In fact, Joe Klimavicz, CIO of NOAA, can recall the moment, early in his 25-year career with the federal government, when he was asked to develop software on a shared IBM mainframe that employees nationwide would use to access one computer.
The concept of sharing services has evolved quickly under Klimavicz’s leadership, and NOAA is widely respected in federal IT circles as a pioneer in shared IT services. Using his knowledge about shared services enabled Klimiavicz to identify and deploy new technologies that others were still hesitant to embrace, including virtualization and cloud computing.
NOAA is also leveraging key big data solutions. As it collects more than 2 billion observations from 17 satellites, and another 1.5 billion observations from sensors around the world each day, the agency relies on supercomputers that can process 213 trillion calculations per second. This data plays a major role in increasing tracking accuracy of hurricanes and other major weather systems, as well as detailed long-term climate modeling. This information feeds into the recently launched Historical Hurricane Tracks website, which has made available to the public in an interactive map more than 170 years of global hurricane data.
Klimiavicz’s leadership in pushing these technologies has given other federal IT leaders the confidence to move forward with similar projects. For example, the National Weather Service, which is managed by NOAA, recently migrated its high-performance computing efforts to a private cloud.
