Data Management at the Tactical Edge
Building a Unified Data Platform with Simple ManagementI

nformation technology
modernization is a top priority
for the U.S. federal government,
and as one of the largest agencies,
the Department of Defense (DOD)
is paying especially close attention.
Modernization benefits include
better customer engagement,
cost savings and efficiency—
uncoincidentally in alignment with
the Cross-Agency Priority Goalsof the President’s ManagementAgenda. All of these elements havea common denominator: data.
Whether the goal is to increase
telework and remote access orto optimize next-generation
technologies such as artificial
intelligence, DOD needs a unified
data management platform.
The challenge is that a literaldisconnect known as mass datafragmentation often trips up DOD
on its path toward modernization.
The root causes of mass datafragmentation include the spreadof data assets, which are stored
in disparate places. In the past
decade, innovation has provided
optionality with the cloud,managed services providers andenterprise data centers, but hascompounded the fragmentation
problem. With over 10,000
operational systems, thousands

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of data centers, and millions ofendpoints, DOD has no shortageof ways for data to splinter.
“Not only do all of thoseindividual point solutions generate
a lot of complexity, but they also
cause this whole notion of mass
data fragmentation because you’re
not doing things in a consolidated
fashion,” said Steve Grewal,
federal chief technology officer atCohesity, a software-defined data
management company. “You endup with these individual islands
and individual footprints of data.”

Three Strategies

DOD has issued three main andinterconnected strategies thatemphasize data—and sharedaccess to it—as the key to keeping
the department on a forward
trajectory.
The first is the DOD Cloud
Strategy. Released in December
2018, its second sentencereads, “Data and our ability toprocess data at the ready are
differentiators to ensure mission
success.” It goes on to focus cloud
implementation on two types ofwork, including the establishmentof platforms that can receive dataand applications.
The second strategy is DOD’s

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy.
It calls for a common foundation ofshared data and unified data storesand establishes the Joint AI Centerto accelerate DOD’s use of AI.
Currently, mass datafragmentation inhibits thedepartment’s ability to use nextgeneration technologies such as AIand machine learning (ML). “TheAI/ML outcomes are only as goodas your data, so have the data
accessible and then make sure you
have data accuracy so you can start
to overlay these AI/ML initiatives
on top of that,” said Grewal, who
was deputy CIO at the General
Services Administration from 2016
to 2018.
The third strategy—the DOD
Digital Modernization Strategy—
ties the other two together anddraws on a Defense Information
Systems Agency strategic plan
to create “a more secure,coordinated, seamless, transparent
and cost-effective architecture
for the DOD that transforms
data into actionable informationand ensures dependable mission
execution in the face of apersistent cyber threat.”
But DOD is an inherently
disjointed organization withmore than 430 components. Thatfragmentation affects DOD’s tacticaledge because there is no consistentarchitecture and consumption acrosssolutions.
The salve for these cuts is a unified
data management platform thatbrings data together and adds amanagement layer to ease accessand analysis, overcoming thefragmentation while letting DOD
maintain its legacy assets. This
commonality brings many benefits,
but also its own challenges.

Stronger together

The main goal of consolidating
data is making it more available
and usable so that agencies can gain
insights that can help them meet theirmissions. But unification brings otherbenefits, too.
For instance, data lays a foundation
for AI and ML—and the automation
they enable. AI and ML tools, which
inherently rely on accessible data,
are poised to affect every aspect ofDOD, especially AIOps, or AI for
IT operations. That’s the notion thatmany tasks IT workers typically do
manually can be automated.
“If you can do a good job
automating the commodity andinfrastructure functions leveraging
next-gen technology, then it really
gives you the resources to start
focusing on the mission or thebusiness side of the house,”
Grewal said.
Consolidating data silos alsoenhances cybersecurity. The
proliferation of point solutions
increases the number of environmentsthat require protection and oversight.
“As agencies move these silos
to one platform, they gain greater
visibility into their data end to end
and into the movement of that data
across the organization, whether
authorized or unauthorized,”

Grewal said. “This gives themgreater visibility and reduces theorganization’s attack surface.”
Despite these benefits, challenges
persist. At DOD, many organizations
compete for the same kind of service
portfolio. What’s needed are betterdefined roles and responsibilities andempowerment of those organizations
to take on initiatives that promote
data consolidation.
“An ideal environment would be
a consolidated data-managementas-a-service architecture—havinga service provider organization in
DOD and then having a variety oforganizations that are consumingthat service would be best because it
will reduce duplication, it will reducecomplexity, it would obviously
save the taxpayer money, and thenit would give you that optimal not
only technology architecture, butalso that optimal service provider
model,” Grewal said.

Conclusion

DOD has already made progress withdata management. The department
hired its first chief data officer in
2018, and it finalized in fiscal 2018a data tagging strategy in recognitionof the importance of metadata.
Late last year, the Army released
a data plan that applies to all of theservice’s data and describes “a global,standards-based environment wheredata and information are visible,accessible, understandable, trusted,interoperable, and secure.” The
Army also set a cloud strategy thatemphasizes using real-time data to
support operations.
Still, additional opportunities
exist for technology and process
improvements at DOD. By applying acommon data management platformthat can ingest data from manysources—cloud, servers, storage

and backup—DOD can take legacy
applications and datasets and enable
the application of next-generation
capabilities, greater security and set
the stage for future success.

About Us
About CTG Federal
CTG Federal is a small business that excels
in servicing dozens of federal defense,
intelligence, and civilian organizations
with IT expertise and solutions. We are
specialists in designing and implementing
next generation IT solutions that help savetime and money for our customers. Our
areas of practice include data center, hybrid
cloud, networking, cyber security solutions
process automation (RPA) and services.
CTG Federal is proudly certified as a Great
Place to Work with 100% of our employees
rating us as such. CTG is headquartered in
the greater Washington DC area.

About Cohesity
Cohesity ushers in a new era in data
management that solves a criticalchallenge facing businesses today: mass
data fragmentation. The vast majority ofenterprise data — backups, archives, fileshares, object stores, and data used fordev/test and analytics — sits in fragmented
infrastructure silos that make it hard toprotect, expensive to manage, and difficult
to analyze. Cohesity consolidates silos
onto one web-scale platform, spanning
on-premises, cloud, and the edge, anduniquely empowers organizations to run appson that platform — making it easier thanever to back up and extract insights fromdata. Now with EAL2+ certification, federal
customers can experience a comprehensive
set of capabilities that push the edge insecurity with these certifications. Cohesity
is a 2019 CNBC Disruptor and was nameda Technology Pioneer by the World Economic
Forum. Visit our website and blog, follow
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