Leidos’ Mathieu Guillebaud and homeland security leaders on taking cloud to the edge

Leidos’ Mathieu Guillebaud, product development director for Global Security Products at Leidos, joined panelists Richard Clark, chief technology officer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Edward J. Mays of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) at the Federal News Network’s Civilian Cloud Exchange for a conversation to discuss the future of the cloud for homeland security missions and best practices for protecting and managing enterprise IT.

Led by Federal News Network’s Tom Temin, they discussed CBP and ICE's approaches to cloud computing and best practices for securing and managing data from the edge to the cloud. They agreed that cloud-first architectures represent the future of enterprise IT.

“We're very happy that we are 100% in the cloud," Clark said of ICE. He said leaving Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data centers began mainly as a cost-saving measure. But the migration has since returned other benefits, including the ability to deliver enterprise IT solutions across the organization's large geographical footprint.

Cloud migration has also positioned ICE to take advantage of emerging cloud-based technologies as they become available. “We've spent a lot of time getting our infrastructure set up to support that," he said.

According to Mays, CBP is still making the transition to the cloud. “We are about 68% in the cloud now," he said. “We still have some applications in our remaining data center, which we're hoping to close by the end of calendar year '25." Mays cited speed of service as a significant benefit of IT modernization. “The coolest thing about all of this is the value we're delivering," he said. “We can deliver a high-quality application very, very fast."

Mays also pointed out that what's true of today's technology landscape may not hold six months or even ten days from now. “So you have to be adaptive, have to be agile," he said.

Guillebaud agreed that cloud solutions are already bringing new capabilities to DHS. “We think of it in terms of extending the cloud out to the edge, of bridging that gap," he said. “By doing that, we're enabling a different way to think about decision-making at the different mission layers." For example, CBP personnel can process data from Leidos-provided scanners on servers at ports of entry for immediate action and upload it to the cloud for deeper analysis.

Guillebaud named four critical strategies for managing cloud-based enterprise IT services.

• Optimizing cloud costs through continuous monitoring of cloud workloads

• Data interoperability across diverse environments

• Cybersecurity that evolves with the threat landscape

• Data management strategies that handle ever-increasing volumes of data

Learn more about Leidos Digital Modernization Capabilities

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