“Not Meeting Mission” A common phrase amongst Defense, Homeland Security and Federal Civilian CIOs is that their network and IT services are not meeting the mission demands of the agents, officers and users in the field, nor are they flexible for changing missions, emerging needs and emergencies. They are also facing the challenge of shrinking budgets, as Congress seeks to get back to pre-9/11 levels. Their current architectures consist of siloed, large volumes of data sets with little bandwidth to transport it.

Under these current conditions, agencies struggle with accessing and comparing biometric, biographic or other data to determine if the person(s) that they have encountered is a national security threat. In recent and past hurricanes, oil spills and other disasters, agencies are not able to have full situational awareness at the tactical level on scene or the operational level at their headquarters. They are not able to rapidly expand to collect, exploit and disseminate geospatial imagery or video from aircraft, including unmanned aerial vehicles, to best use available resources in a timely, actionable fashion. This limits the effectiveness of the response and ability to help people or prevent further loss of life and property. After spending billions on expensive platforms such as command centers, tactical vehicles, ships, aircraft and drones, agencies are unable to collect, store and analyze performance information to make efficient and informed maintenance plans.

CIO’s are also coping with the threat of cyber-attacks across a distributed and non-standard cyber terrain. While some legacy federal employees are resistant to cloud usage and disruptive innovation for fear of losing their job, others have led independent system migrations to cloud without access to a broader enterprise architecture, causing de-centralized access, and “cloud sprawl”. With shrinking budgets, technology obsolescence, cyber vulnerabilities, CIOs claim to have “technical debt” and are faced with the need for enterprise wide architectural changes, implemented incrementally.

By leveraging Equinix’ interconnection oriented architecture, government agencies will:

Reach everywhere, interconnect everyone, and integrate everything

In order to transform their mission, Equinix enables government agencies to transform their digital enterprise across all phases of the system lifecycle and elements of a system architecture. This includes the research and development phase, data center optimization, application optimization, hybrid cloud, big data and cybersecurity. By applying the interconnected oriented architecture across the enterprise, government agencies can interconnect people, locations, clouds and data to perform the various missions and services of government.