Modernizing Public Sector IT: Balancing Innovation, Security and Compliance – The Last Great Cloud Transformation EP8

Hi everybody, and you've joined us today on another episode of the Last Great Cloud Transformation. We're happy to, uh, be doing this series, uh, sponsored by CloudFlare, talking about really the evolution, kind of where we're going next, how the cloud is looks today, but what it's gonna look like tomorrow, what some of the drivers are behind that from the old days of hub and spoke, and just connecting places in our, through our connecting through our suppliers. Um, networks take on a lot of different characteristics today, matter of fact, what we think of as the network as quite a bit different.

So, uh, I'm Mitch Ashley and I am VP and practice lead, uh, at, uh, with one of the analyst areas at, uh, RUM Group. Also have served as CTO with the Techron group, folks that are putting this on. And I have the pleasure of being joined by a couple distinguished, uh, gentlemen here today.

First of all, uh, Dan, do you wanna introduce yourself? Both with CloudFlare, by the way? Dan, go ahead.

Sure, Sure. Thanks. Uh, Mitch, uh, Dan Kent here.

I'm the field CTO for CloudFlare, um, supporting, uh, the Americas and in particular folks on public sector. Uh, prior to that I've been a CTO prior, six years prior to that, uh, focused on mostly around public sector offers and, uh, os. And then, uh, prior to that I was at, uh, Cisco for 15 years, where I public supported the public sector as the airfield CTO.

Great long longevity in this part of the industry, which is perfect for this conversation. Great. Let's next go to Matt.

Matt, introduce, introduce yourself. Yeah, very happy to, uh, nice to be here. Mitch, uh, Matthew Schneider.

I lead our US public sector team, uh, was brought over to CloudFlare about three years ago now to build out the public sector, go to market. Uh, my last 30 years or so in the public sector have led to this coming from service providers and infrastructure companies over with Dan at Cisco for a long time, uh, into, into software with VMware and, uh, security with Palo Alto before joining, uh, CloudFlare, except about three years ago. So very excited.

Excellent. Very good. Well, when we say public sector, uh, Matt, you know, that that is a very big, you were talking about super large 'cause you're talking about everything from the Defense Department to Department of the Interior, or what, if any agency, any department.

Um, maybe if you give us your thoughts initially of what some of the, the biggest challenges in modernizing it in these organizations are. Yeah. As, as you said, public sector is, it's a microcosm of the rest of the industry.

So it's everything from manufacturing for elements, you know, with, with our US department of Mint and, and where we would go. I know the NSI to finance, to healthcare, to every other element in there. So you, so you have, you have the, the same challenges you do in enter enterprise, but you have an increased amount of what, what we, we unfortunately refer to as technical debt, as these programs continue to build and be ma you know, required to be maintained at a different level than a traditional enterprise mine.

So we get to the environment where government will always be in a state of modernizing. They will never be fully modernized from that footprint. So, um, whether it's, you know, the mainframes that still exist, uh, in so many parts of government today as they do in enterprise right on down to trying to increase citizen services and constituent services, um, you know, they're always gonna be chasing that goal of delivering at the same pace of, of the enterprise out there.

You know, one of the things from my experience in the public sector too, is it's not a solution from one vendor. It's a integrator or, you know, a prime on the contract. And you have a lot of companies coming together that gets selected in those deals, uh, for that, which means where do you go for, for kind of support or picking up, uh, pieces of where they were left when that contract was done, what's that like to unravel and untangle that and kind of figure out what all this is where it came from, and how do we move it forward?

Give us a little bit of a thought on that. I'm, I'm interested in your ideas, Dan, you wanna go with that one? Sure.

I'll, I'll go with that one. Yeah. It is interesting.

Uh, one of the differences, and and we're talking really just the federal government right now, uh, because public sector does support, it includes state and local as well as education in most cases. Uh, but in the federal government, those very large programs and, and what differentiates the federal government agencies from commercial and, and there's com a lot of commonality like Matt brought up, uh, oftentimes. So these programs that they're building are much larger than an enterprise.

Now, obviously here in retail, you look at Amazon, that's a pretty large enterprise. Uh, but if you look at the, like, social security, they have a program that has to support every citizen in the United States, 300 million customers. So, um, and it makes it, and the other issue with it is typically it's a one-off.

There's only one of them, right? So, and that's why it's complicated, and that's why they bring in these multi-vendor, uh, systems integrator. 'cause they're typically are building something that wasn't built before, um, for one customer.

And so it's really hard to then repeat that and sell it somewhere else. So, uh, but interestingly, looking at that and the technical debt we've mentioned, uh, because these systems are so big and so complicated, we do find some of these applications like social Security, like the IRS that are 50 years old, still have COBOL in them, and we are now absolutely going through and how do we pull those back apart, and how do we modernize those? And, uh, as we, we've come to talk about micro modernization rather than the Big Bang theory of replacing it all at once, uh, because you have to do it that way.

We've realized to think, uh, one of the easiest ways to modernize is piece by piece ahead of time. Uh, when you try to do the Big Bang approach, uh, that's typically when you hear the core stories of the government overspending, unfortunately, and, and taking much longer than it should take. Yeah, I remember the quickest way to, uh, lose your, lose your job in telecom was to replace the billing system.

I can't imagine trying to replace large IRS system, something like that. Um, you know, and in the commercial sector, usually it's some kind of finance, either a gain of what we're looking to, we need to do something in market, so we need to modernize this, or it's a cost reduction. Are those similar drivers in the public sector, or are there other ones that we don't see in the commercial side?

I'll, I'll jump in, Dan. I, I think those are definitely there, right? And, and you can look at budgets.

I mean, the amazing thing about working with public sector is everything is public out there. So you can look at, you know, what is spent year in and year out on maintaining these legacy systems. And you know, I I, I saw one stat that, uh, you know, I, I think it was $68 billion last year in, in the federal space towards maintaining legacy systems.

So the scale of maintaining those is massive niche. Um, but the other thing that comes into play there is the fact that, you know, this revolves around the constituent, you know, the government is there to serve the constituents. So I think we have seen this change of how do we increase the delivery of services, you know, through the use of technology to the constituent at a LE level we never have before.

So I think that is a shifting mindset that is driving a lot of modernization in a very good way of how do we, you know, when you log in through your state, you know, how do we make sure you have one login that gets you to your DMV, but also your applications that you need to, um, read and under your benefits that, that you're requesting, as opposed to three very different environments for that, that a historically been that, You know, it, uh, at every level, you know, you were mentioning earlier about it, you know, education state and local government as well as federal one characteristic, at least on the government side, is the leadership is constantly changing, right? Or whether it's, you know, new presidential administrations is coming in with their priorities and slashes of what they change or, you know, at a, at a gov, a governor or legislature level. So priorities change sometimes pretty quickly.

We're seeing a lot of change happening with the Trump administration stepping in, um, a lot of things that we're, you know, regulations now aren't, or we're not gonna follow that, we're gonna do something different. Um, it seems to me that that requires a lot of flexibility of how do you support that? Because oftentimes it's sort of like the long chain, you know, you snap one in and it takes a while for it to make it all the way to the end.

Uh, how do you help, how do you help the, the organizations you work with respond to those kinds of dangers? I'm curious. Yeah, I'll take this one.

Uh, so oftentimes those change that happens at the administration, they're not as, uh, direct or as impactful, um, as actually we're seeing this year, right? I think we're, uh, uh, the president came in with a plan very specifically to change a lot what was going on in the government. So, uh, I've been in the government supporting public sector for 30 years and been through many administrative changes.

This is probably the, uh, one of the, the most direct to, Hey, I want to change the government. And quite honestly, I think you need to go through these because the government, through bureaucracy, and I think bureaucracy isn't necessarily a bad thing in the government, right? Uh, when things change, you don't want the machine that 300 million people are dependent on every day to change very often, frequently, but you do need to change over time.

So we do a lot of the innovations that Matt talked about, and, and we just, like in the commercial world, we see that happening pockets and go forward, but every once in a while you really need that, um, kind of the, the stoke, the flame, just a little to change dramatic a little more dramatically. So I don't, this is gonna be a little different for us in the public sector than previous administrations. Um, and we'll see, I'm not sure it's a necessarily a terrible thing.

Uh, how the agencies address this and, um, deal with the budget cuts and deal with the headcount changes will be interesting. But, uh, I'm confident the, we have the ability to support it with the ecosystem that supports the government, and, uh, if there's a will, there's a way to get it to work, right? And folks that are in the commercial world have to deal with budget cuts all the time and have to deal with this all the time.

So there's no reason why the government can't deal with it as well. Yeah. And if, if I, if I can just add in and bring it, you know, more to a, to a state and a local level.

'cause that guy, I think there's some, some good lessons learned there. Um, I, I live in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and we get a new governor every four years. Uh, you know, so you, you know, change is gonna happen every four years.

A lot of government has addressed this through, you know, it strategic plans and, and publishing what their five year roadmap is. And what's, what's interesting though is, you know, as administration change and leadership changes, if you go back and look at the National Association of State cio, uh, NASCIO as an organization, they publish their top 10 concerns, uh, that are out there every year, every year since. And Dan, I don't remember the number if it's 15 years now that they've done it, but it, it, it goes, it goes way back.

Uh, cybersecurity has been at the top every single year. So, you know, I, I think fundamentally, as we look at things like cloud, as we look at things like AI that's coming in, which finished number two on the list this year, uh, you know, we know that cybersecurity is gonna remain up there. We know that legacy modernization has been on that list from the beginning.

We know that the citizen experience, which is around, you know, data analytics and how to, to serve that constituent or that citizen, we know that AI is gonna come into play. So I think generally government working together knows where they need to go. It's how can, how can industry partner with them, and how can we, you know, know, achieve those bite side chunks that have very meaningful impact for them.

That is really gonna be the different from Dan. I mentioned these Big Bang projects. I don't think there's an appetite anywhere, whether that's at, at the federal level or, you know, down to your local, you know, local government to be able to say, let's take on a project that's gonna take four more years to do it.

So it, it's about that incremental change to serve the citizen. And, you know, cybersecurity is at the top, uh, of how do we continue to do this in a, in a manner that keeps, uh, the citizen data safe. I, I, I imagine nobody walks in and says, we're not gonna do cybersecurity anymore.

That's not important. Let's do something else. No, that's, that's on everybody's top list in commercial and in government.

Well, let's talk about the network side of this. You know, when I was doing network kind of work, it was still in the days of this point to this point who the provider was. And you kind of built Stitch it all together as like an erector set, right?

And what Box does what in the, in the rack that does this kind of security or this kind of routing or whatever it might be. Um, and the network doesn't look anything like that today, right? It's, it's all software driven, and you have providers like, you know, CloudFare, like Flare, like yourself, and full disclosure, tech Strong is a customer of CloudFlare.

So I've worked with you and your organization a lot and enjoy that. You have a great service. Um, talk about how that fits into the strategy that you mentioned, Matt, uh, in that priority.

So you're, you're obviously advising and working with, uh, the governmental agencies at all levels on where they're going, and you know, how you obviously can help them get there and make that transition. Yeah, I, I think one of the biggest ways it fits in is we talked about, you know, where the government wants to modernize too, but we also talked about those legacy infrastructures that they're coming from, whether that's on-prem or one of the first generation, you know, cloud migrations they've had, whether it's, you know, SaaS, you know, services inside of that. The reality is government, just like industry has struggled with, you know, retaining top talent, recruiting talent, you know, a retired workforce.

So the challenge of how do I support all of those environments is I wrote at the forefront of mine, uh, of government leadership. So the, the use of network needs to be thought of, not in terms of how do I get a user to one specific application, which was a lot of the legacy, you know, mindsets of how we get it. Do I need to get this user to this in terms of how do I, a how am I able to get all users to all the environments they might need to go to knowing that that's a changing environment of where that user might be, whether that is a constituent coming in, whether that's a contractor working with government coming in, whether it's a return to work that, that we're seeing take place.

And those applications don't all live behind, you know, the, the moat and castle of the Legacy network anymore. So if I'm getting a user to an application that's outside of my world, how do I make sure I have the right controls? And do I wanna have to think of security independently from network, or should I be thinking of one, you know, common layer of connectivity across the board?

So how do I connect all users to all applications in the right way, you know, when they should add access to it. And more and more often that involves using the internet is that core foundation of connectivity. And the, that's where obviously cloth fits in quite nicely as we're talking to customers about that.

Dan, I imagine you've got something to say about this. Yeah, and I, I, I helped build a lot of those networks back in the day. Um, You can imagine.

So, uh, yeah, but like Matt was saying, you know, we we're Not saying it's your fault though, Dan, just to Not judging, no judging We're my friends, because I realized we have to replace those systems with the newer systems, new models. So when we, when we built those networks, like Matt was saying, you 80% of your traffic flow stayed within your environment, whether that your environment was a campus or, you know, your environment was a land and your campus and 20% went outside. Um, it's reversed that now, right?

The way we write, build applications through microservices architectures, it, it, it's, none of that is built in your, in your environments. So a lot of our customers in public sector don't have data centers anymore, right? There's, you know, if you look at where Harlow Sector has helped lead, they were very quick to push for cloud, um, and, and very quick to look at how this new environment was gonna impact cybersecurity.

So terms such as Zero trust actually came from the public sector, uh, because the landscape has now much larger than it's ever been before, because the way we build net applications, the fact that we have a workforce that's distributed and, and it's just gonna keep growing, right? You, you'll have less and less resources in your physical environment, uh, and you'll share resources outside of physical environment. So you have to be prepared for that from a cybersecurity perspective.

Um, but that's, like you said, that's why cloud player is here. We understand that the, the internet is not just a nice to have, it is a critical infrastructure for most every company and many public service customers now because of that new environment that which we live in. So, um, how do you then secure that properly?

How do you control that threat landscape and shrink it through zero trust technologies and capabilities, and how do you prevent the, uh, the nefarious actors that are out there from coming into your environment, right? So, um, we talk a lot about that with our customers, and we show them how we can do that, uh, from a, a different approach than what the way we did it 10 years ago, quite honestly. And, and it's probably a whole nother podcast just on, uh, you certifications in the public sector that would, would be good to put anyone to sleep, but, you know, how do you do it with compliance?

How do you, how do you make sure you maintain, you know, you know, all the regulations that's put in front of, uh, you know, our customers to, to, to, to achieve across the board as well? So, and that, that's one of those other great challenges out there that governments faced with, With, I think way I positioned it with people are we, the public sector has the same issues and concerns as the public, as the private sector. They just have a different security equation, right?

We all have this security equation. If you work with a bank, they can, uh, give loans ba and they give loans based on a risk management risk assessment. Um, and they have an equation that they can take so much risk on for so much investment.

Uh, if you put point that back into a public sector, they don't have the same risk equation. Um, and it's because they have constituents that they worry about and they, they, they have a zero, um, uh, risk in, in some areas because it's Department of Defense, you know, you just don't have risk you're gonna take on there. Um, and, and, and that's, that's really the biggest difference.

And compliance is a big part of making sure that that risk equation is addressed. Um, and, and there's a lot of outta that. I mean, we can thank the Department of Defense on the internet because they built it because they needed to have redundancy and communications for Department of Defense Back to the Darpanet days.

Right. Thank you very much. Um, you know, it's interesting.

It seems like one of the things, and I'm not trying to just, you know, be a fan boy for CloudFlare, but you know, one of the things you try to do is save money through consolidation, right? Bringing things together and take out the redundancy and redundant systems, and certainly networks. 'cause they might all get built at different times for different projects.

Uh, not always share that, but it seems like as more things have moved to the cloud, um, both as the hyperscalers and also yourselves, that's one of the ways you can start to move some more security into the cloud, even even parts of the apps into the cloud. And now you're not stuck in a, you know, like what used to be in a stemo data center that was built for that project in that era. Yeah, absolutely.

And, and I think one of the, one of the key factors to that, Mitch, is making sure that, that we'll call it that legacy application has the same level of confidence around the controls when you move it to, when you move it to that new environment, right? One, one of the challenges for government is they've had such purpose-built infrastructures and security around an application based upon where it lived, as opposed to based upon how it needs to live in the future. So we built stacks on protecting an application that lived in a data center in a very certain way, or protecting an application in a SaaS environment in a very particular way.

And I, I think that's one of the powers that, that has to come to play for government to fully modernize, is I need a consistent level of security across the board. So once I get that common visibility, that common control and understanding of who's accessing it, how it needs to be accessed, and how that needs to fit into my risk scenario, then I can, I can maintain that across the different environments. So if I can bring something to every one of my environments with consistency, then I can decouple where that application actually lives in a much more rapid environment.

So that legacy application, once I have confidence that I'd have the same control and protection in the cloud, I can move it to the cloud with much more ease. And that's gonna, one of the really powerful conversations we've been able to have with customers is, one, understanding the risk to that application, which in all, not all risk is equal. I think that's another thing that governments had to take on is, is recognizing that there's levels of risk inside of their environment.

Uh, and that how do I, how do I control that risk in, in mitigate any risk based upon, uh, where it lives? That that is one of the advantages that, that I've seen from working with, you know, a cloud provider like yourselves, is that you can do things in the cloud, like, uh, just simple examples, bot management, web application, firewall, uh, API security, things you can manage in the cloud, but also tailor to different environments, different locations, different, uh, policies, regulations, whatever it might be. But you're still working on a consistent platform for the most part.

So it makes it much easier to manage in the visibility of it. I'm curious about, you know, a big topic today is resilience and my working definition, you know, like any term we have in our industry, there's a thousand definitions. Whatever's purpose it serves to help me is usually the definition that we use, right?

Um, I kind of think of resilience as the ability to, you know, withstand or, or kind of tolerate the unexpected. You know, we all are doing things to increase uptime, but it's those things that we can't totally plan for. And, you know, a meteor hitting the earth is probably one we're not all gonna survive, but there's a lot of other ones we might be a little bit more resilient towards.

How is the public sector thinking about resilience when it comes to networking? Well, they've been thinking about resilience for a long time, right? That, as I I said earlier, that's, that's why we have the internet, right?

Because of the Department of Defense looking at resilience. Uh, but it, it's trickled down. I think cyber resilience is the buzzword this year.

Um, and, and every CISO is thinking what is their role in that? And, and to your point, whether it was cyber threats or, or physical threats that are happening, they're happening more and more frequently. How do you get prepared when the, the, the tsunami or the fires hit, or, you know, hurricane knocks out a city block or two city blocks, you happen to have a big part of your data centers there.

So, um, our, our customers are always thinking of, uh, resilience clearly. Um, and we're a big part of that. Obviously, the, the nice thing as you go to the cloud, uh, you have inherently built in re redundancies.

We built in tools. So to help that redundancy come to light and be active immediately, uh, so that the citizens never even know a, a, a location went down or there was an outage in this, uh, due to this storm or cyber attack. Um, and that, that's the beauty of one, this, this next generation, um, architecture, I'd say shouldn't say next generation.

It is the generation we are in right now, right? The, this cloud generation architecture that was built for applications that are out there in the cloud so that they can withstand a lot of that by default. Um, but we, so we built that into, as part of what cloud play does for our customers and what we really focus on and, and which is our customers, like about us, it's multi-cloud, right?

Because what we're not seeing is not no one's gonna jump everything into Microsoft or to AWS or into cloud play. Everybody has this multi-cloud environment. So it's really important for us to give you that cyber resiliency in a multi-cloud environment.

Um, you know, being that overlay that can do it, whether you're doing it with the CDN technologies or, uh, DNS technologies to let you get that resiliency built in at the layer seven, uh, not just the layer one, two, and three level. Uh, we have to have both, quite honestly. Uh, but we can do it so that you can have your infrastructure, your applications in multiple clouds, and we will help you give you that resiliency across those clouds to include your private clouds.

So it, it's what all of our customers want, and, uh, I think we're hitting a home run on that, that part world. Yeah. And, and I think back, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll do the US old guys kind of reminiscing of, you know, we used to build up our coop sites or our failover sites and talk about what was the downgraded experience in resilience?

Like what had to live there. I I haven't had a conversation like that in years anymore. Um, the power of cloud technologies, you know, whether it's CloudFlare working with a quote unquote competitor or one of our complimentary offerings, you can often layer those in, in an environment where your level of resiliency is, is much greater, and it, it's no longer seen by the end user who needs to get to that cer.

And that's so powerful to be able to say, wow, I can think about this massive leg legacy infrastructure that I'd have to build twice, you know, five, 10 years ago. And now I can have two cloud providers sit there and have redundancy in my DNS environment or of my connectivity to my infrastructure, or across the multiple clouds. I mean, that completely has changed the game.

And we have to break away from that mindset of, you know, oh, this is a separate infrastructure, it's something else. And really just go, how does this service live beyond a failure at one place or another? Hopefully no one has that, but, but we know we have to prepare for it in today's world.

And I think our customers have the, uh, unique, um, vision that they have to take not only resiliency in the backend systems, but the front end systems, right? So because our customers are the folks that go into those disaster areas, right? So how do you create a, when there is no last mile, how do you create the last mile with wireless technologies, et cetera?

And then we can ride right along with that. So We talk about the criticality of, of service. Mitch, if you tell us, us a, you know, a student or a teacher these days that, that inter, you know, internet's less critical for them, that they'll tell you how long they are, right?

You, you talk, talk to your kids about what happens at school when internet goes off these days. So, uh, it's a very different world, you know, than, uh, you know, open the textbook and turn to page, you know, 32, uh, in today's world of the internet is foundational in every element, whether we're talking education right on through to, uh, the critical services of defense and healthcare and beyond. So you're saying the internet is somewhere in the lower stack of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, up there with food and safety and Things like that by, uh, teenagers and early 20 year olds.

So I might put it above food. I'll, I'll say yeah, Barely, right? Yeah.

Live, I don't know your house when TikTok, uh, was shut down for that, You would think a tragedy was happening, you know, and, and it's funny you mentioned that too, uh, Dan, 'cause I was thinking about you're in a world thinking about physical, you know, kinds of events. You're in a world where you now don't have to operate and be resilient when something happens, hurricane or tornado or something. You have to respond.

You, you also have to be able to execute. And that's where other parts of, you know, EMA and other organizations come into play. They have to go in the field and rebuild and get a capability back up.

So you have to live on both ends of it. You can't say, well, we're waiting for our providers to get back going again. No, you are, you are the frontline, uh, in all situations.

Yeah, it makes it a challenge, but it's also fun, right? It's the, you, you see the, that's the public sector has some very unique use cases that no one else gets to, to play around with. So that's one of the reasons why it stuck around for so long in public sector, because we do really interesting, fun things out there.

So, Well, let's do this. We're we're just about out of time, and we could, I could spend another four hours talking to you guys. Um, what, what are, what is kind of top of mind for the next, let's say, this year, maybe going into next year?

What are some, some of the top conversations, the topics of those conversations that you're working on with people? Matt, you kind of alluded to some of 'em around cyber and API security. Any other thoughts on that?

I, I mean, if, if we wanna a whole podcast without talking about ai, I think, uh, we'd be remiss. I mean, that, that, that's clearly top of mind. Um, by the way, It takes you long to not e, E exactly.

So, um, you know, we think about it in a few ways. Um, and it's interesting. It's not just the model that's gonna serve the, the services out to the student or the constituent or the citizen.

It's what should government be using AI for? How do we, as government, takes on more ai? How do we protect those AI models?

Um, how do we make sure that our employees and our contractors are going out and using the right AI tools and, you know, not uploading, you know, the wrong data to the wrong, you know, user setup there. And then ultimately, where is that AI gonna be delivered from? And, and, you know, we, we talked a little bit about, uh, you know, some of the data sovereignty and regulations and stuff, but where is that gonna be delivered from?

How's that gonna be delivered on government services? That, that's very top of mind across the board for whether we're talking educational Research, educational Sharing, government services, and, and even national defense, uh, of how do we take out all of those elements in government? You might not want, uh, government employees signing up for their deep seek service, not yet anyway, was find out what's going on.

That's your perspective, Dan. I, yeah, I think every customer I talk with wants to talk about ai. How do I get prepared for it?

How do I secure my environment before it's here? How do I make sure I'm doing the right thing? Interestingly enough, the government's been doing AI for a long time.

I like call it legacy ai, right? Um, and, and machine learning has been in place for many, many, uh, in use cases in the government. Monday we did the assessment.

There were like 1700 use cases, of which probably, you know, three fourths of those were in machine learning. Now, generative AI is doing, and they are definitely taking that on. Um, but it is, how do we get prepared for it?

What do we need to do? Uh, they don't want to be behind that curve, right? And the government has very quickly realized the dependency of data, um, with ai.

And so, and the government has a data problem. They've got way too much data, right? And a lot of that data has never been labeled or, uh, and so you got all this data.

So they, we spent a lot of time with, you know, customers talking about where do we start? Well, we start with looking at your data, um, understand the AI technology to go in and get familiar with how they act and build guardrails around those. And, uh, but really you gotta focus on your data management, uh, strategy first.

Um, and that's pretty daunting, especially in the federal government because they've been collecting data on many things for a long time. Um, but it, it, it, it trickles all the way down to universities and, and, uh, state and local as well. So that's what we talk about.

We talk about ai, how they can use AI in various use cases. And very quickly, we've got to, let's talk about data management and let's talk about protecting your assets that you have, um, while building out these new AI models. Well, we do have, we do have a parting gift for everybody that waits till the end of the episode to bring up ai.

So you guys, let's get one. We'll send that to you in the mail, right? Gentlemen, it's been a real pleasure, uh, both Matt and Kent, uh, fantastic talking with you about it.

You know, it, having done worked with the government a little bit myself, both in education, but also in in work. You, you, you get to see how much research is actually funded by the government, which is why there's so much adoption of AI and other technologies, security technologies, a lot of things that, you know, not everybody in private sector realizes that's there. So we appreciate the hard work that's also done, but also funded by the government.

Well, thank you both for, uh, joining us here on the last great cloud, cloud transformation, uh, program, video series and episode, talking about the public sector. Wish you both, uh, all the success as you work with the new administration now, and the next one after that, whenever that happens, as well as whatever level that is. So, uh, keep us safe and secure, and thanks for helping deliver those services that we get from our government.

So, thanks again. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We look forward to seeing you next time.