GiGi Schumm,
Vice President and General Manager, Public Sector, Symantec Corp.

Well, we cheated a little on this one and chose a product area rather than a single product, focused on data identity and data loss prevention. We have a number of products that all attack this issue of knowing where your data is, who owns it and then making sure it stays where it ’s supposed to.

We have our Data Insight product, which is all about understanding the ownership and use of data. Then there’s our Data Loss Prevention product. And then, more recently, our encryption technologies have become important as a part of the entire spectrum of the data protection and data loss prevention program. And finally, once our acquisition of VeriSign closes, we’ll have the final piece in place, which is identity protection.

These aren’t cloud technologies in themselves, but we believe they are the most important in enabling agencies to move their current or new applications to the cloud. In the old days of securing the infrastructure people first built a strong perimeter, then made sure the networks were secure, then focused on making sure specific systems were locked down tight. That all turned out to be not enough. With things like virtualization and the cloud the emphasis has to be on where the information is, who should have access to it and ensuring that only those who do can access it.

Tom Ruff,
Vice President, Public Sector, Akamai Technologies, Inc.

The internet is becoming a critical part of an agency ’s IT delivery infrastructure. However, the internet historically provided very little QOS (Quality of Service) and controls to ensure a customer could use the internet to deliver mission critical applications and content. Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator (DSA) service, built on our cloud platform, gives agencies the performance, reliability, availability and controls they need to leverage the internet for business

How do you get closer to your constituents, partners, and sister agencies?  How do you deliver new capabilities quickly, in a transparent, accessible, and secure manner?  How do you deploy for scale and availability fast, while only paying for what you actually need, without fielding excess infrastructure?  These are problems that the cloud is working to solve for Federal agencies, and this is why Akamai built, deployed, and operates our DSA service.  Akamai’s DSA cloud service allows agencies to extend their reach across the globe in order to serve end users anywhere in the world, regardless of internet conditions. 

Delivering the control they need to manage and distribute information rich content and applications anytime, anyplace.  Akamai’s DSA Secure service provides federal agencies with an architectural cloud foundation built on solid and proven cloud delivery experience.

Richard W. Johnson,
Chief Technology Officer and Vice President, Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions

If you ’re able to find one magical product that provides a complete end-to-end secure mission cloud we’ll certainly look at it.

Seriously, there are certain technologies that are vital to cloud computing service delivery. The two most important are virtualization and Internet-based communications. Those are the two that really have spurred the cloud. But the reality is that no one product  foundationally provides an end-to-end cloud solution. It’s an integration of multiple technologies. The core is virtualization and communications.