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Securing Tomorrow Priorities for the CBP Office of Information & Technology

• Homeland Security & Defense Forum

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The CBP Office of Information & Technology is focused on advancing secure, agile, and innovative IT solutions to support border security, trade enforcement, and traveler facilitation. Hear Dr. Ed Mays’ priorities related to modernizing legacy systems, enhancing cybersecurity frameworks, and leveraging emerging technologies like AI and cloud computing to address evolving mission demands.

  • Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP
  • Dr. Barry West, former DHS Acting Deputy CIO (moderator)

This discussion took place at the HSDF’s Border Security Symposium on December 11th, 2024 

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• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

Thank you.

• Dr. Barry West, former DHS Acting Deputy CIO (moderator):

Good afternoon and thanks Megan, and thanks the Homeland Security Defense Forum for hosting this. I think it's a great, great environment, great great place here to bring together some of our top Homeland Security executives. Ed, thank you for being here. I know the busy schedule you have. I know you were in Austin, texas, yesterday, you flew in late last night, early this morning and you're here doing other things, so really thank you for taking time out of your schedule. We have about 30 minutes and I'm just going to dive right on in Ed and we really want to try to bring up to date the folks on a lot of the transformation that we're seeing. I'm going to just go right into it. As you balance innovation and operations, how is security being addressed so that the innovation still happens in a secure environment?

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

So, first of all, that's a marvelous question, but one of the things I want to do is make sure that you know I thank everybody for allowing me to be here today and you know, it's all about the mission for us at CBP and every from the top at CBP headquarters, enterprise Services, all the way down to OIT, and we've got such a great team. And when I look at whether it's our CISO, scott Davis, our CTOs Neil Mardigari, who's here in the audience, dak Alessandro, running software I'm saying this because the team is so important to do those things that you asked about. Security is job one, right. So, as we're providing capability out to the enterprise, whether that's officers or agents in the field, you know, the first thought that we have is how do we secure the data and how do we push it out to them so they can use it, be efficient and effective, and making sure that we were also protecting those jewels of the American people, because there's a lot of adversaries out there that would love to have that information.

• Dr. Barry West, former DHS Acting Deputy CIO (moderator):

Yeah, we hear a lot about edge computing. How is edge computing, along with artificial intelligence, being used for non-intrusive inspections? An example metahuman capabilities currently being used at CBP to revolutionize border security operations.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

Well, that's a really big question in terms of scope. One of the things I like to say is that I, you know, I think CBP is ahead of a lot of other organizations. When you look at what we're doing with AI and edge computing, you know people say, ed, what's edge computing? What did it start? I always say, is anyone old enough to remember Sputnik? Well, if you are, I think that was edge computing way back right.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

If you look at what we're doing now, it's such a it's, you know it is pushing the data center forward. It's also putting things out there for data fusion, like sensors, c2 centers, for, if you're in the US, border Patrol, and how do we do that work? Right, far edge, near edge, and it's really a lot of thought, engineering, right? You got to think about what you want to do. So we work very closely with our trusted partners, first of all, and helping to understand, you know, what they need, where they need it, so that we can deliver it effectively and efficiently. You know, and you always got to think about cost, right. So there's all these trade-offs, but we do this with a teaming approach, right, our CTO is involved, our CISOs involved. You know, our data center people are involved. We've got several projects that are underway right now to include something that we call Douglas Analytics, which has actually been a great learning experience for us, but there's also been a lot of work that we've leveraged.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

I don't want people to think that this is brand new. Right, we've learned a lot from the great work, the foundational work done by Border Patrol right, great work and allowed us to figure out how to move forward. So, when you start to look at what we can do with this newer capability, especially Gen AI, and you look at things like anomaly detection, these are newer capabilities that we can now push down to different levels. Right, if you roll back the clock about two years, very few people were talking about AI and Gen AI. If you look at probabilistic sort of modeling and that sort of AI, we were doing it a long time ago, 2013-ish, here at CBP. But Gen AI the changes there are relatively new and there's a lot happening. And I will tell you, from a security perspective, I think we are doing the right things, and I say that because if you look out at how you put a package together right with respect to how you secure the data, putting the governance around, that CBP is doing a lot of thought leadership and I think we're doing that in a lot of places.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

I was out yesterday in Austin and someone was talking about CloudSmart you know, one of the other efforts that we're working and you know I started laughing and they probably thought he's a silly guy, but I'm thinking those are the words that we wrote in 2017 that somebody else adopted right here at CBP, so pretty excited about the changes that we drive and the value that we're adding. I think if you talk to our customer base, our trusted partner base now, they will say that we are joined at the hip right. We are tightly coupled. When I was here, when I got here in 2016, I couldn't tell you who my trusted partner was. I was locked into a data center. I didn't know anything outside of what was happening, but that's not the case today. So I look at our leadership, especially the things that were done previously but currently under RAC, sanjay Bhagwale, our CIO, and he forces a teaming effort right. We fight hard at night, meaning we are on whiteboards and arguing about this or that, but we are driving technology forward and we're driving technology because of mission right. There's a need out there to ensure that that officer and agent that's literally, you know, as Marina would say at the tip of the spear, right, being alone and unafraid, if you will, and needing access to IT services, whether that's data, whether that's voice, whatever it happens to be, or location information, you know. So I think we're doing a really good job of that and AI is becoming a bigger part and it's going to do even better things that we're doing than we're doing now.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

The question with respect to the metahuman I think our CTO sitting there, sunil, and I talk about this a lot because I think you know one of the things in terms of a metahuman, which is an avatar with an underpending sort of AI capability, with an underpinning sort of AI capability. That's the future, right? That translation capability, the ability to do sort of searches and interaction with something that kind of looks like a human being, right, I think, as human beings. And here's a couple of just easy use cases If you were coming into an airport and there were some UFO people here in the room, if you're coming into an airport and all of a sudden you've got someone coming in from, let's say, chad I think Chad's in Africa. I don't know what language is spoken there, but I think the probability or the likelihood of you having someone that speaks the language from Chad at the airport is going to be pretty small, right? And so now you've got you know an officer who's now spending a lot of time trying to figure out what's happening with this person, then you're going to have a reachback capability, probably on a contract, to get you know someone that speaks the language, and so that language would probably be an unusual case. So now, that takes longer.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

But when you're looking at something like an advanced capability, like a human that can speak 140 languages 80 in context All of a sudden you're now reducing that time. Right, and the time is what's so critical to us. If you look at our biggest cost, whether it's in IT or other places, the time is, you know the human cost, right, and that you know, if we're not watching that carefully, that becomes, you know, exponentially explosive in terms of cost and or effectiveness and or effectiveness. So that's just one example, right, where you could have someone interacting with a person in their own language. Our officer would be seeing it in his or her language and then being able to. How about this? And you know how we love forms of government, have the AI actually build that out for us in their language and have them verify.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

That's a simple thing if you're looking at something like trade, and there's also an analogous sort of thing if you're looking at US Border Patrol as well, meeting someone in the air environment that might need that sort of capability or language translation. But even things when you look at trade, when you start to ask questions about how do I move something into the US, how do I bring it there is a lot of policy out there and getting an understanding of it, even just a starter stock sort of thing, is incredibly hard. So, having an AI, you can say I want to move tuna from South America to here. What's the policy around it? Could you package that up and send it to me? I mean getting capabilities that actually reduce the time for you know those customers of the US government right and make them more efficient and also help them to ask better questions right, because sometimes, just you know, trying to zero in on that bullseye of the thing that you want becomes very difficult, very difficult to do.

• Dr. Barry West, former DHS Acting Deputy CIO (moderator):

That's really good, Ed, Keeping with that cloud computing platform, it's still very significant. I mean, we're hearing a lot about AI, obviously, and quantum and a lot of the other technologies. Cloud and you guys have been one of the leaders at CBP Can you speak to the importance of compute storage and bandwidth and using cloud and how it's helped transform your business?

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

Absolutely so. The good news is, I think, from an app tier level, we're about 83, 84 percent in the cloud, right. We still have about 40 percent of the database tier still on premise, right. You know, we've got a multi-cloud strategy and we're also looking at hybrid cloud as well. So we've done a lot of work and we started 2017, 2016 on this journey and I think we're one of the leaders in terms of the US government. We took an approach of and it's one of those cool latin phrases festina lente, right, meaning go slow to go fast. So we learned a lot along the way, you know, building out our capability, um, and you know we've been really successful. And we've been successful because, honestly, you know, cbp has just a lot of really good people and we work through problems, right, and I think that is that sort of innovation and that drive to make sure that we meet mission and carries us forward. But when you start to look at that, almost all of that I mean 80 plus percent, you know, of our apps now are running and you look at our downtime now. 80 plus percent of our apps now are running and you look at our downtime now.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

When I came on board 2016,. Our mean time to recover. I see some people laughing who were there. That's right. Our mean time to recover from an app being down was 16 hours. Now that probably seems outrageous to anybody in the room. Can you imagine the automated commercial environment being down the room? Can you imagine like the automated commercial environment being down, that's ACE being down for 16 hours at $11.5 to $150 million an hour, based on how long the thing is down? Absolutely not acceptable. Right Now that we've been in the cloud, our MTTR has gone way down, our availability is sky high and now there are trade-offs.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

Right, you've got to figure out what you want to do, what applications are most important, and so I think that's really critical in terms of partnering, because you've got to be able to watch costs. Do I think there's a lot more that we've got to do in terms of enabling cloud capability? Absolutely, we've had budget requests in for years and I'm pretty excited because we got some great congressional marks this year First time ever. I'm like man, this is exciting. But you know we're going to continue to drive automation. We're going to continue to drive capability. We partner really closely with Border Patrol and an OFO and AMO, and this relationship has never been better.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

What does that turn into? That becomes requirements that are actionable. You know you always talk about actionable intelligence, actionable requirements. I mean those are the things that we can actually do for people in the now, meaning we can change their lives, we can change, you know, their ability to get work done, whatever that mission or that work happens to be Versus. You know, I'm a former acquisition professional, you know the old, you know former DA Deere, but you know it's that five-year sort of plan where you know something happens maybe over a long period. We don't work in that kind of organization, right. We have changes that are dynamic and they're happening now, right. So you know our sort of effort with Ukraine and others. We've been dynamic, right.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

If you look at all the things I'll tell you inside of our CTO shop and our CTO works really closely with me we turn things around really fast, right, and the only constraint normally for us is really funding. Right, we are a really good organization in terms of CBP and OIT and I think everybody is mission-focused. And you know, if you look at what we're doing with Common Operational Picture, operational Technology, we are hand are hand in hand with AMO. We're hand in hand with US Border Patrol. I mean, I think XD Singleton has me on speed dial. You know, both good and bad, like either it's working or this really needs to be fixed now Right, and we do that Right. Now right, and we do that right, and beyond that, we're now being able to push those cloud capabilities out in terms of towers, in terms of, you know, getting the AI out into the field.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

Now, one of the challenges that we're definitely going to have, right, because you asked about bandwidth and you asked about storage, the more capability that we get, the greater that demand signal is going to change our architecture and that's going to drive cost. Everyone now is using ChatGPT or some other AI. When that volume of people grows and it will right and that demand for that capability inside of government organization grows and it will right, what's going to happen is a huge demand for bandwidth, right, there's going to be huge demand for compute and, definitely, storage. When I look at some of our storage requirements, when you look at records management, now, some of our records have to be out there for a lot of years, like 70. So that's humongous.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

So I think we're going to have to do this smartly and I think we spend a lot of time with that, but it is really a team effort. Looking at, what does that policy look like? What are we really going to focus on? You know, are there any constraints beyond budget? So I think that governance piece is really going to drive a lot of what we're doing as well, along with mission.

• Dr. Barry West, former DHS Acting Deputy CIO (moderator):

Absolutely. Well, I'm going to date myself a little. I was a first responder during the Three Mile Island incident up in Pennsylvania back in 1979. And I saw recently about Microsoft making a purchase of that facility and I wanted to get your thoughts on the innovative approach of our cloud service providers, and not just the top three, because I think we have to count Oracle as one of those now the four main cloud service providers. So I wanted to get your thought about that. How far-fetched is that, these innovative ideas of our cloud service?

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

providers. So I will stay away from the Three Mile Island that one, because I usually make jokes and this is not a good place for that. But I will tell you that I think our CSPs are doing a phenomenal job and I look across the board and I think the capabilities are coming incredibly fast. And you mentioned Oracle. We've got, if you name, the cloud. We probably got a little bit of it right. So the big four, I think we've got all of them. Little bit of it right, so the big four, I think we've got all of them. But I think there is. You know, I was in a meeting a couple of days back and people were talking about there's a big shift back to going back to data centers, right. Well, I would say that, look, there's some capability that should. There's a hybrid sort of model right, that should be a part of what you're doing.

• Dr. Barry West, former DHS Acting Deputy CIO (moderator):

But we've done really well in terms of having a capability in the cloud that's able to respond to our instantaneous demand signal. What advice would you give the audience in helping CBP and DHS as a whole, as they are dealing now with the continuing resolution for budget monies, presidential transition and the maturity of technologies such as AI and quantum? What can industry be doing to help you and your colleagues the best way?

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

Well, first of all, I think the biggest thing is one be patient, right, because we're in a time of change, right? Two, make sure that you come with solutions that actually support our trusted partners, our customers. Right, we can't have fits and starts right and it can't be fits and starts right and it can't be, you know, it can't be a learning experience, right, we really need real, knowledgeable experts to come in and deliver capability. And I'll tell you, mr Modigari and I, we take a lot of meetings together and we're both technologists, right. Right, so we sit there and we realize who the real people are that are bringing an actual solution and those that are just. If I start smiling like that, it means I don't believe you, right, so it's the truth. Right, I'm very honest about that. But so we want you to come and bring real solutions, because we're going to challenge you. Right, because what we deliver to our customer base, when we start to look at whether it's AMO, border Patrol, et cetera, right, we got to deliver capability that works and not that we've got to, you know, fix from moment one. Right, it's got to come out of the box working, and if that means we need to do upfront work with you. That's what it means. We'll do it, but it's not a time for experimentation.

• Dr. Edward Mays, Deputy Assistant Commissioner and Chief Enterprise Infrastructure Officer, CBP:

We're in a very tough sort of economic environment where business cases are really important, right, and I think that's going to become even more important in the new administration. Right, you've got to be able to prove what you're going to do and make sure that it makes logical sense and that it has some sort of you know, return on investment or return on assets, right, whether it's saving time for people or it's saving you know, cost in some sort of perspective. So I always think about that. But bottom line for us always is mission first. Right, we got to make sure that we're taking care of our trusted partners, our officers and agents, because they're putting their lives on the line. So I think those are the most important things. But our doors are open. I don't think I turn down any meetings. I stay late at night, so you might have to take a late night call. I know Sunil does as well. Right, I'll be there. So if you want to chat about something, please get on the schedule.

• Dr. Barry West, former DHS Acting Deputy CIO (moderator):

Dr Mays, thank you so much for your service to our country. Really appreciate it.