Security

Modernizing Federal Network Operations: Observability and Automation

Many agencies remain noncompliant with zero-trust security requirements.

Gary Arnce is a data center solutions manager at CDW Government.

Peter Dunn is a seasoned technology and cybersecurity leader with over 25 years of experience driving digital transformation, AI integration and zero-trust initiatives across federal agencies and private enterprises.

Legacy capabilities on many agencies’ networks remain noncompliant with federal zero-trust security requirements, a problem exacerbated by employees being required to return to the office.

Industry partners such as CDW Government can help these agencies move from manually modifying and monitoring their networks to policy-driven, intent-based automation of those processes.

Prompted by increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks, agencies are looking for ways to automate and orchestrate their networks with modern observability capabilities that will allow their employees to work securely in the office while reducing outages, ensuring compliance and speeding service delivery.

Click the banner below to see how identity and access management can improve the user experience.

Observability Isn’t Optional for Agencies Anymore

Recent zero-trust guidance moved observability from optional to mandatory with President Biden’s executive order on improving the nation’s cybersecurity, which requires agencies to have real-time network telemetry. Vendors must provide the capability in their solutions and will soon need to meet the U.S. military’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification 2.0.

CDW Government has a well-established practice with Red Hat, whose Ansible Automation solution functions as a single source of truth while automating IT operations, orchestrating workflows and improving efficiency. With a history of proven deployments, the CDW Government team understands how to augment agency staff and deploy automation in brownfield cleanup and greenfield setup scenarios.

Click the banner below for the latest federal IT and cybersecurity insights.

Making Time and Money Available To Upskill Employees in Automation

The biggest challenge agencies face when establishing an automation practice is upskilling their talent. To that end, CDW Government partnered with Palo Alto Networks and Cisco to offer federal employees customized training in industry best practices within a fixed contract.

Agencies lacking an automation knowledge base are at the greatest security risk, which is why CDW Government makes an entire learning offering available that can be tailored to team dynamics and individual learners.

To put things in perspective, the Cisco Certified Network Associate Exam didn’t have any questions about automation in 2020, but that content has been added over the past three years. That’s how quickly automation is evolving.

Not everyone on an agency’s IT team will understand Cisco’s reference architecture and methods, how troubleshooting has changed due to automation, and the way to query and look for abnormalities. Agencies must make time and money available to at least upskill their top talent.

Not everyone within an agency is a change agent, so IT teams must assess their skill sets and personnel and establish a path to modernization. CDW Government can help put that individualized plan together, provided the agency is open to it.

This article is part of FedTech’s CapITal blog series.