Last week, Zenoss was a sponsor and exhibitor at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems (DoDIIS) Worldwide Conference in San Antonio. Hosted by the Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Information Office (DIA CIO), the 2015 conference's theme, "Accelerating Intelligence Integration-Powered by Innovation & Technology," was designed to highlight the DIA CIO's commitment and intent to unify the defense intelligence infrastructure and information-sharing initiatives through innovation, collaborative partnerships, and rapid adoption of new technologies to support agency missions and objectives.
Interacting with leadership from the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)Â and Department of Defense (DoD) IT professionals and industry on current and future requirements, we heard one common message: The need for actionable intelligence that improves mission preparedness and mission assurance is essential.
Mission assurance includes the disciplined application of system engineering, risk management, quality, and management principles to achieve success of a design, development, testing, deployment, and operations process. One of the key tenets of mission assurance is the achievement of 100 percent operational integrity and uptime of mission critical systems. The ultimate goal of mission assurance is to create a state of resiliency that supports the continuation of an agency's missions, systems, and processes and protects its employees, assets, services, and functions wherever they may be at all times.
In discussions with the IC leadership, it was clear that the need for actionable data and the real-time analysis achieved by providing a unified view of their infrastructure is and will continue to be a driving factor for decisions. And as agencies look for new ways to collaborate, integrate, and share resources, this will only become more pressing. Knowing the health and status of the complex systems and IT services supporting a mission is essential to being able to ensure mission success. With unified monitoring platforms that provide dynamic views of the infrastructure and IT service dependencies, IT professionals are able to determine if systems are operating at peak performance and are ready to support the mission. IT management can then take proactive measures as necessary to reduce IT service outages that my impede mission success.
Also highlighted in our discussions was the fact that recent budget cuts — 30 percent or more at some agencies — are driving agencies to re-evaluate their infrastructure choices and move to more nimble, cost-effective, and highly virtualized environments. Leadership emphasized the need to adopt monitoring platforms that have been developed to support today's technologies and can be easily extended to support solutions that are under development today as well as those of the future. The retirement of costly and outdated IT monitoring tools that require large supporting infrastructure and sizable subject-matter expert teams to operate is a crucial step in moving agencies forward. With the adoption of monitoring platforms that are highly scalable, easily extendable, and quickly deployed, the IC will be able to more rapidly adopt new technologies to meet the challenges they face around the world as well as reduce the downtime of systems used in situations where downtime can potentially cost lives, not just impact the bottom line.
