Leidos’ Jason Rapalski on how multicloud adoption changes enterprise management

Jason Rapalski, vice president and director of the Digital Modernization Accelerator at Leidos, spoke with Federal News Network's Tom Temin about the U.S. military's transition to the cloud.

Rapalski identified two critical challenges for the armed forces and defense services as they modernize IT infrastructure and enable interoperability between systems: security and cost.

Security challenges multiply with the addition of components to systems, particularly at the edge, according to Rapalski. “You've added a lot of new attack vectors," he says of elements such as sensors in the field. Managing the security risk means keeping up with the pace of change within the evolving IT environment.

Controlling operating costs also becomes more complicated with cloud-driven modernization due to the cloud's dynamic nature, Rapalski says. “To be able to scale quickly also creates the risk that you increase cost quickly." Careful planning and visibility are crucial to managing the cloud cost challenge, according to Rapalski.

Add to these complications the challenge of managing different classification levels for data. “Especially as you're looking to move things around, you're absolutely understanding how that's going to stay in line with your security policies," Rapalski advises. “Having construct-design plans and concepts for how you set up your cloud environments really helps because you bake those necessary requirements into those environments," he says. “You create secure landing zones to be able to build those things out with those policies already in place."

Rapalski cited three ingredients for successful cloud deployments.

Visibility

Always know what's happening in your environment, Rapalski advises. That means deploying enterprise visibility and control services.

FinOps

Financial visibility and control are also critical, Rapalski says. “You want to have a FinOps component in place to be able to understand where different aspects of your environment are impacting the cost," he says. “That's going to be key to your efficiency."

Identity management

Rapalski advises deploying a federated authentication component to manage access across different cloud environments. “This becomes really key as folks are looking towards the Zero Trust environment," he says.

And all parts of the organization need to be in the loop on cloud deployments. “The folks managing the money definitely need to know what's going on," Rapalski says. “You have to engage your developers, your IT staff, your leadership staff…all levels of the organization to be engaged to make this work."