Technically Speaking

This time last year, the CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch™ reported on mounting cyber threats facing organizations as they raced to adopt work-from-home practices and adapt to constraints imposed by the rapidly escalating COVID-19 crisis. Unfortunately, the 12 months that followed have offered little in the way of reprieve for defenders. The past year has been marked by some of the most significant and widespread cyberattacks the world has seen.

Zero Trust is an approach to network security which assumes that just because something is on your network, doesn’t necessarily mean it is trustworthy. Zero Trust allows organizations to apply security controls to network traffic within the perimeter, not just at the edge.

The numbers don't lie. The U.S. public sector is rapidly adopting cloud technologies across the spectrum. According to the NASCIO 2020 State CIO Survey, only 14% of state chief information officer (CIO) organizations do not have a cloud migration strategy, whereas 41% of respondents indicated that they had implemented a cloud first strategy for all new applications.

We’re in the month of September, the busiest time of the year for those selling to the Federal government. When the dust has settled on Q4 of this federal fiscal year, our customers will have spent roughly $30 billion in “fall out money” on IT. That’s a term for funding agencies and offices will lose if they don’t allocate it by September 30. If an office, agency, or department leaves appropriated funds on the table, they’ll have a hard time justifying why they need the same or higher funding levels the following year, hence the year-end rush.

Current IT modernization initiatives are challenging federal agencies to implement significant changes to their infrastructure at a breakneck pace. As they look to keep pace with an increasingly sophisticated cyber threat environment and accommodate workflows shifting to the cloud, the federal government is looking to zero trust as a solution. Zero trust is a security model that maintains secure access to data and applications based on dynamic security policies reacting to access request specifics, as opposed to the network from where access originates.

DLT’s Chief Data Scientist, Sherry Bennett, recently sat down recently with Lora L. Allen, Medallia’s Public Sector Principal CX Advisor and discussed her service in the public sector, Lora’s role at Medallia helping educate and advise government agencies that are tackling CX challenges, and more. Q: Prior to joining Medallia, you spent your entire career in public service, can you kindly tell me how your service has shaped and informed your current focus on customer experience?