Whitepaper

GOVERNMENTUSDA Data Modernization
and Confluent
The Data Challenge
Data is the by-product of every digital action taken by USDA mission areas, partners and by the public communities that it supports.
Across all mission areas from food safety to rural development or farm production, every system, process and sensor generates data.
Information technology makes it easier for organizations to collect, store and share data. Too often though, data doesn’t get to thepeople at the “point of contact” who need it to make better decisions and create more tailored experiences for end users.
Most Government organizations possess a complex landscape of data stores and point to point, often batch, integrations. While this has
served reasonably well in the past, it tends to be expensive and often inefficient. It is also challenging to field new capabilities and thelimitations of data sitting at rest often result in inconsistencies in the user or customer experience. To provide richer, more complete andsatisfying “customer” experiences, organizations such as USDA must adapt legacy data stores to bring data to the point of action.

Data-in-motion
Data-in-motion has emerged as a new paradigm to achieve this objective, enabling data to flow across the enterprise as a continuous
stream of events, making for highly personalized interactions and best possible decisions and actions.

Real-time Insights with Confluent© 2023 Confluent, Inc. | Confluent.io1Whitepaper | USDA

USDA Strategy
As part of the USDA Data Strategy, there is a stated plan to “develop and leverage technology, infrastructure, and analytics tools toenable shared access and use of data to achieve our mission and drive innovation.” Each Mission Area, Program and the Enterprise needs
the ability to access and share data to produce information products at their organization level. Ongoing modernization efforts to shift
workloads to the cloud can help but integrating on-prem and cloud-based systems so that data flows in a timely manner across thehybrid IT landscape requires unique software architecture and capabilities. This approach also needs to work with existing data silos
while making it possible to rationalize and retire them in the future as appropriate.
A data in motion platform will enable the USDA to create data pipelines that stream data as it is created to the apps, systems and usersthat need it most. This ensures a consistent view of inventories, eligibility, balances, cyber threats, etc. and ensures that systems are insync, providing a consistent experience for users and customers across channels and enabling action as events occur.

Introducing Confluent
Confluent Platform was designed specifically to meet the requirements of complex enterprises like the USDA’s. It is the leading
data-in-motion software, from the creators of Apache Kafka® in response to the explosive growth and adoption of Kafka, a highlyscalable, event-driven open source software project capable of processing trillions of events per day.
With Confluent, USDA can deploy across on-prem and cloud environments so the different Mission Areas can continue to manage theirdata as they need. It creates a flexible and future-ready data infrastructure by decoupling producers and consumers, simplifying how
data can be combined in new ways to bring new applications online or retire end-of-life data sources. As DISC/OCIO work to stand up
new capabilities, Confluent easily integrates new data sources and existing systems without impacting existing data workflows.
Once data is moving through Confluent, future modernization efforts become more efficient and much less costly.

Why Confluent
Confluent completes Apache Kafka by adding a number of essential Enterprise-grade capabilities:

Enterprise Security

Data Connectors

Role Based Access Control, Encryption, structured audit logs andOut of the box for 160+ data sources and sinks to speed

integration with directory services

development and limit maintenance efforts, e.g. Oracle, Splunk,
Snowflake, S3, Databricks, Salesforce etc.

Resilience

Developer Productivity

Cluster linking and multi-region cluster data replication toMulti language support and schema registry to ensure

minimize unplanned downtime and avoid data loss

compatibility across schema and application versions

Enterprise Manageability

Enterprise Support

Streamline operations with performance tuning, Kubernetes

Best in class 24/7 end-to-end expert technical support,

Operator and Ansible Playbooks for ease of deployment, andwith emergency patching for both Confluent & Apache Kafka

management/governance interface
Private companies such as Netflix, Tivo, FedEx, and Epic Games rely on Confluent to run their business. Federal Government
customers relying on Confluent for streaming data management, data sharing and advanced analytics include IRS, USPS, VA, CMS,DISA, US Army and many other agencies and services.

Ready to get started? Contact a Confluent expert today
Email us at publicsector@confluent.io | Or visit www.confluent.io/government/ for more details© 2023 Confluent, Inc. | Confluent.io2