Leidos’ Srini Iyer on gaining data advantage in federal health care

Srini Iyer, senior vice president, and chief technology officer for the Health Group at Leidos, spoke with Federal News Network's Jory Heckman about protecting healthcare data and improving patient outcomes with cloud solutions. They also talked about the future of cloud computing and best practices for emerging technologies and ever-growing volumes of data for IT modernization.

Iyer said that government healthcare providers can reduce costs and improve access to quality care using cloud technologies. But doing so depends on robust security, both at the edge and in the cloud.

“Security in the cloud environment is a shared responsibility," Iyer said. “It's a responsibility between the cloud service provider and the user of the data."

Cloud service providers are responsible for providing dependable and secure infrastructure. But organizations and users have a responsibility, too.

“It is up to the user of the applications or the app owner to ensure that there is security all the way through," Iyer said. “We need to be looking at encrypted data all the way from the handset to the back end, and then back to the handset."

Especially in healthcare, robust security depends on protecting data on on-premises servers, according to Iyer. Iyer gave as an example a pathology laboratory for which Leidos provides services. “One blood sample could be a petabyte of data," he said. “You can't move those data back and forth to the cloud, so what you're seeing is a hybrid approach of having data both on-prem and in cloud, and looking to see how we can protect that across the board."

But this hybrid approach to enterprise IT introduces another challenge: managing what Iyer termed cloud sprawl, with data residing in multiple clouds and on-premises servers. According to Iyer, managers of enterprise IT services need two critical elements to manage the data sprawl challenge. These are:

Visibility

Visibility through a single-pane-of-glass view of data across cloud service providers, particularly as workloads and data move from one service to another

Governance

Governance that ensures organizations don't overprovision services, spend too much money, or under-provision services, leaving users without access to services when they need them

As for what's on the horizon for enterprise IT solutions, Iyer named generative AI as a game-changer. “One takeaway I will leave behind is that AI is here to stay," he said. “It is going to change how we do business on a day-to-day basis, whether we like it or not." Therefore, organizations need to prepare. “Organizational change management is extremely critical. Upskilling your workforce is a big part of that."

Learn more about Leidos Digital Modernization Capabilities

Watch the video playback above and the next in the series: Leidos’ Mathieu Guillebaud joins DHS on a panel discussing going all in on cloud, from enterprise to edge