The importance of technology “observability” has been growing by “leaps and bounds” as Federal agencies continue their journeys to the cloud and strive to meet government mandates, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said on Dec. 12.
Rob Cole, chief of the Distributed Services Branch at DHS’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), said increasing visibility is helping USCIS mature its systems in the cloud. The agency has been migrating to the cloud since 2014.
“Everything is kind of a work in progress, especially as technology changes and new processes come out,” Cole said at the Datadog Observe conference in Washington, D.C. “But I think we’ve been taking some leaps and bounds on [observability], especially from a holistic visibility standpoint – having the right tools in place to validate the health of our applications, being able to monitor our infrastructure, and really starting to kind of tie that together through more of a democratization of this visibility for the organization.”
Jeremy Yates, a deputy technology architect at Ginnie Mae, said observability has aided his agency’s efforts to identify and mitigate “growing security concerns.” Ginnie Mae’s systems are now fully in the cloud.
“You take that into account with the observability that we have into the environment,” he said. “We’re able to see a lot more. So it’s allowing us to understand what’s going on in that space and then to rethink it and re-strategize it … there’s always been some tools for observability around to different levels and different capabilities. I think there’s more of a focus on it now.”
Their comments, delivered at a Datadog Observe panel on the evolving cloud adoption strategies of Federal agencies, reinforced how observability has become a vital accelerator for government agencies to speed progress on cloud, customer experience, and other government mandates.
During the “Cloud Through a New Lens” panel discussion, government and industry participants said agencies are relatively far along in their cloud journeys and are now re-evaluating best practices, preparing for new security threats and other obstacles, and sticking with procedures that work.
Jonathan Feibus, chief information security officer and director of the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Division at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), said his agency is more than halfway through moving most of its business systems to the cloud.
Now, he said, as more sensitive materials are included in the transition, “we’re looking to make sure that we have appropriate role-based access controls, that we are not mixing it with other cloud data, and that we have the right folks working on it at the right times. The bigger piece of that is, are we optimizing it because it’s coming from our on-prem data center?”
“It will be on a good path forward for the future,” Feibus added. “You end up finding a way. You’re going to do some dumb things. You’re going to overspend your budget, but those lessons are going to help you get things straight.”
Ginnie Mae’s Yates advised Federal IT leader to be patient as the transition to the cloud continues to evolve.
“I think it sounds slightly cliche, but it truly is a journey into the cloud,” he said as the session concluded. “It’s not going to be there day one, and it’s not going to be there year one. So I think if you go into that with your eyes open and a true understanding of what it’s going to take to get there … then you’ll have a little more success.”