Many government cybersecurity experts are trying to find the hackers and bad guys through a lot of noise on their systems, but the process of wading through that noise can take up needed time, according to Randy Hahn, associate director of public center enterprise architecture at Verizon Enterprise Solutions.
“That process can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two,” Hahn said.
In a normal environment, Hahn explained, someone would try to use an application and would call the help desk when it failed. The help desk would get a ticket for the problem, which they would then send to the applications team, then the server team, the network team, and so on until one ticket came back reporting where the problem was.
“We’re surprised all the time that agencies have different ticketing systems, and they don’t talk to each other,” said Steven LeFrancois, managing director and solutions architect for Verizon Enterprise Solutions public sector division.
Verizon announced on Thursday the release of their Verizon Global Enterprise IT Management (GEITM) service, which is designed to provide a unified framework through which CIOs can have visibility into their entire infrastructure’s operations.
“This platform was intended to help offload a lot of the day to day noise,” said Hahn. “When that application or something in that infrastructure goes south or goes red, the infrastructure itself will start looking for the problem.”
“Government agencies are increasingly dependent on digital technology to operate efficiently and provide enhanced services to constituents, and the ever-expanding list of IT products and reporting tools make it difficult to manage and maintain security for these services–particularly in an increased virtual environment,” said LeFrancois. He added that many agencies are having to learn every new technology vendor on the fly.
Agencies are also dealing with expanding boundaries of their networks, as more data is moved between data centers and cloud services and more applications are added to the infrastructure.
“The big buzz for the last few years has been about data center consolidation,” LeFrancois said.
“The boundary our customer is managing every day is expanding,” Hahn said. “As the boundaries expand they can view it as one enterprise instead of a network of enterprises.”
In consideration of the challenging budgeting process that many government agencies face, the GEITM system allows those agencies to pay for only the capacity they need.
“It allows them to consume the capacity on an as needed basis,” said LeFrancois. “Allowing them to consume this on a sliding scale really helps in the budgeting process.”
