How differentiating cloud provider’s capabilities will be a boon to defense agencies

As defense agencies build out their cloud environment, they have a wide range of use cases that need to be addressed, such as improving workforce collaboration, modernizing mission delivery and providing critical mission insights in austere environments. Strategically planning the modernization of cloud and applications to take full advantage of cloud capabilities will be critical to the success of these use cases.

Leaning into the expertise of cloud partners can better prepare defense organizations to leverage different capabilities each cloud environment offers, according to Bryan Thomas, managing director for the Department of Defense at Google Public Sector, in a recent podcast interview for DefenseScoop, produced by Scoop News Group and underwritten by Google for Government.

Thomas elaborated on some key capabilities distinguishing Google Cloud from other cloud providers in the space, starting with the unique way the platform has been engineered.

“Instead of building out a government cloud with separate data centers, Google took a different approach to our IL2 to IL5 accreditation,” he explained, sharing that the company did a logical separation of its data centers with its network capabilities versus a physical separation in order to provide true commercial cloud capabilities with workloads that have compliance needs.

He notes that in his conversations with those organizations doubling down on digital and data transformation, there is a particular interest in modernizing applications to better connect with APIs and connect to data points so that AI-assisted applications will have the desired outcome.

“Google, as an organization, is leaning into this conversation commercially, globally and within our products. We are preparing our Department of Defense customers to look at our AI principles and to partner with us to think about what their principles need to be to protect the data for the DOD.”

He also stresses the importance of security in the cloud as more applications and data become integrated into these modern environments. Google’s deep history in zero trust is a strong differentiating factor from other providers; according to Thomas,

“I think Google is one of the [commercial] superpowers of security right now…Starting with Google’s network infrastructure and sub-sea cables that are running around the globe and run this zero-trust architecture.”

He states how Google’s 10 consumer applications — including search, Gmail, YouTube and Pixel — are running over a billion users per application and leveraging zero-trust architecture to ensure all consumer-based products and cloud solutions, including Google Cloud Platform, are secure and our customer’s data is their data.

There’s a lot we’ve invested into our security portfolio in addition to that, including our Mandiant acquisition solutions, automatic threat detection and our security command center.

Listen to the full podcast conversation and learn more about data-driven capabilities to transform DOD cloud capabilities.

You can hear more of our latest coverage on IT developments in the defense space by subscribing to the Defense Scoop podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and Stitcher.

This podcast was produced by Scoop News Group, for DefenseScoop, and underwritten by Google for Government.