Navy Data Center Consolidation - A Story of Government Coping with Disruptive Technologies,
and Thoughts on Opportunities in the Offing
R. Scot Hopkins, Captain, U.S. Navy (Ret.), Senior Partner, Grace and Associates, and Thoughts on Opportunities in the Offing
Following the lead of the former Office of Management and Budget CIO Vivek Kundra, federal agencies, and the Department of Defense in particular, have developed plans to consolidate and shutter hundreds of data centers within the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative. The military services, sensing an opportunity to "book savings" in an era of stagnant or declining real budgets, are moving aggressively to migrate applications into enterprise data centers in an effort that began in 2012 and will continue through at least 2018. This session will explore real techniques, products, and solutions that can accelerate the migration of legacy applications and avoid delays that may interfere with the realization of expected savings.
Assured Command and Control
Juliana F. Rosati, Deputy Director, Navy CIO Division
In keeping with the Chief of Naval Operations warfighting tenets of "Warfighting First, Operate Forward, Be Ready" the Navy has developed an Information Dominance Roadmap to ensure our warfighters have the tools and capabilities they need to dominate the electromagnetic spectrum and cyber domains. The roadmap include three core capabilities: Assured Command and Control, Battlespace Awareness, and Integrated Fires. This session will focus on Assured Command and Control (Assured C2), which provides the backbone of the Information Dominance Roadmap, and the enable the other two core capabilities. Although the roadmap is a Navy-specific activity, the presentation will touch on broader topics such as the maturation of our single ashore network environment to the Next Generation Network (NGEN), and our disparate Afloat networks (those on our ships) to a more cohesive environment that is Navy's first-ever large network built with security and information assurance policies from the start. The presentation will include some areas where Navy could use the help of industry and academia as we continue to improve our capabilities within today's unprecedented austere budget environment.
A New Approach to Fortifying Federal IT Infrastructures: Application Delivery Firewall
Ryan Johnson, F5 Field Systems Engineer
Tom Leyland, F5 Field Systems Engineer
Conventional firewalls are failing in the face of increasingly complex Internet threats. An Application Delivery Firewall, however, protects the entire infrastructure with full application visibility and control, while scaling to perform under the most demanding conditions. This session will explain how bringing together your network, apps, data, and users under a single ICSA Labs-certified security strategy can provide strong DoS protection, web application defense, and high performance Layer 3/Layer 4 firewall capabilities.
Mobility 2.0! Strategies for Successfully Meeting the Mobile Challenge
Thom Walker, F5 Field Systems Engineer
Trying to meet the needs of today's mobile workforce presents many challenges, especially for federal agencies. How do you secure an untold number of mobile devices while still providing access to critical business applications? What strategy will you use to keep pace with the ever-changing landscape of mobile devices, operating systems, and apps? Join Thomas Walker in an investigation of the evolution of mobility to discover new technologies and practices aimed at providing secure, useable, and manageable access to enterprise applications via any remote platform your users choose. Topics will include advanced authentication, application specific secure remote access, and secure app deployment to your mobile workforce.
Application Acceleration Services: The Path to Improved User Experience and Lower Costs
Carl Brothers, F5 Field Systems Engineer
Today's federal workforce is increasingly consuming more data via web applications delivered to any type of device. Maintaining an acceptable user experience while reducing bandwidth costs allows development teams to focus on delivering more mission capabilities even to users with low bandwidth and high latency. Attend this session to learn how to optimize and accelerate websites and web applications, whether through desktops or mobile devices, for improved user experience and reduced support costs.
Distributing Applications for Disaster Planning and Availability
John Lee, F5 Field Systems Engineer
Site outages due to attacks, network failures, or natural disasters are a major cause of service disruption, wasted resources, and loss of productivity. Creating a DR/COOP site as part of a disaster recovery solution is not only critical to maintaining agency operations, but in many cases it is a regulatory requirement. However, it can be costly, error prone, and slow if deployed incorrectly or haphazardly. This session will show you that creating secondary data centers as part of a complete application delivery solution doesn't have to be difficult or complicated.
Optimize, Accelerate and Secure VDI to Ensure Anywhere Access
Kevin Stewart, F5 Field Systems Engineer
Desktop virtualization can help you speed migrations, enhance security, and reduce OpEx - all while delivering a consistent user experience. But implementing the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) necessary to make these gains can increase IT complexity, resulting in higher costs and heavily taxed network resources. This session explores solutions that enhance the performance of Citrix- and VMware-delivered applications and desktops over the WAN, while dramatically simplifying operational complexities. You will learn why this approach eliminates the need for point solutions by providing granular, policy-based, and context-aware access, and support for strong multi-factor authentication. This session will also include a robust discussion of VDI authentication technologies.
Facilitating Workplace-as-a-Service with Fast, Secure Application Access
Michael Coleman, F5 Field Systems Engineer
Ensuring remote workers have universal access to the resources they need is a top priority for federal agencies, but IT organizations are painfully aware of the challenges associated with achieving that goal. The right authentication and access controls are critical to maintaining security, but optimizing application performance is equally important. As mobile devices become ubiquitous, the issue becomes even more complicated. This session will explore access policy management strategies, including SSL VPN, PKI CAC/PIV and others, that can enable workplace-as-a-service.