The Founding Fathers' Guide to Federal IT

Happy 250th birthday, America. In this special shortened Fourth of July episode of The GIST of Govt IT, Brian and Sean keep it snackable for the beach-and-boat crowd — kicking off with a debate over favorite founding fathers before turning to a rundown of the GIST 360 summer event lineup. Sean previews what's coming: a July 14 breakfast briefing at the National Press Club on securing the converged IT/OT/IoT enterprise; a mid-year federal IT priority-setting session featuring a fireside chat with CISA Director Nick Andersen, an ATARC roundtable on operationalizing continuous threat exposure management, as well as several webinars on deck. If you want to know where federal IT leaders are placing their bets for the last stretch of the fiscal year, this is your map to the conversations that matter. Plus a kite-surfing Ben Franklin!

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RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Upcoming GIST 360 Events

- July 14 — Breakfast Briefing, National Press Club - "When the Perimeter Disappears: Securing the Converged Federal Enterprise Across IT, IoT, and OT"

- July 14 — Mid-Year Federal IT Priority Setting & Listening Session, The Riggs Rooftop (9th & E, Washington DC, 5:30–7:30 PM)

- August 13 — Webinar: "From the Edge to the Enterprise: The Future of Mission-Critical Infrastructure"

- August 25 — Webinar: "Rethinking Command and Control Resiliency at the Tactical Edge"

The Hosts & Show
- Swish
- GIST 360
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CONNECT WITH US

Got an idea for a future episode? Want to be a guest? Let us know.

Brian Lake - blake@swishdata.com

Sean Applegate - sapplegate@swishdata.com

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or gist360.com.

Transcript

Fourth Of July Kickoff

Brian Lake 0:00

Happy birthday, America. We're keeping it short and snackable this week because we know half of you are on a boat and the other half are just trying to stay cool in the DC humidity. So today, Sean and I settled the only debate that matters on the 4th of July, who's the best founding father. We'll then walk you through the summer lineup of just 360 events, from securing the disappearing IT and OT perimeter to a fireside chat with the director of SISA. So whether you're at the beach or in the briefing room, you know what we have to do. Let's get down to the gist of it. And as always, I'm joined with my co-host, Mike and Padre, the CTO Extraordinaire, and the old Marine himself, and Mr. Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mr. Sean Applegate. Hey, Sean, how are you doing today, buddy? Hey, Simper Five, Brian. Happy birthday, America. I hope everybody had a great 4th of July holiday. We've got a special kind of shortened show today. I know a lot of folks are at the beach recovering from a very festivous 250th anniversary of America, the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I'm hoping everybody had a safe and wonderful holiday.

Picking A Favorite Founding Father

Brian Lake 1:27

Uh but before we dig into what we're going to talk about today, Sean, I got to ask, who's your favorite founding father? All right.

Sean Applegate 1:33

So so I'm a big fan of Thomas Jefferson. One, he's from local Virginia, which I love. I'm a Virginia resident, you know, been down, seen his place. Pretty cool. Yeah. He uh I think did some interesting engineering stuff at at home, which I I I like if you haven't been down to uh to tour that in Charlottesville, you should. But more importantly, he's a huge fan of individual freedoms, uh rights of free speech, and religion. So I think when you look at things that influenced the core values of America, I think he's a very important person that did that and was a huge advocate for that. Second, I spent a lot of time around the mountains in the last couple months, both internationally in the southern, what's called the Southern Alps, New Zealand, and a lot of time in Montana uh a few weeks ago. And uh my father in lives out out in Idaho as well, so I really enjoy out west. And I can't imagine not having the western part of the United States. You know, Thomas Jefferson, I think, did the big best and largest real estate deal ever. Uh nobody, nobody else can claim that in America, I don't think, even if uh Donald Trump tries to current president might disagree on that, but it's okay. I don't I don't think you can beat the Louisiana Purchase ever. And also as a you know, as a film that loves the outdoors, and and uh you know, when you think of the Lewis and Clark exploration, just amazing, you know, project to take on as a president. And then the last thing I like about Thomas Jefferson, when he took over the presidency, he was all about being frugal and as a small business owner and uh and uh and Marines that get by with just what they need to and no more, and uh and a fan of continuous improvement, right? I think a very uh reducing toil, he led the presidency on a very tight budget. He eliminated a lot of the fluff from uh John Adams previously to him. Oh, boy. So the staffing around the staffing around the president, you know, his president's presidency was very lean. Yeah he spent the American taxpayer money very effectively and looked at a good return on investment. He wasn't too uh too extravagant.

Brian Lake 3:32

And and obviously you can't help but also mention Thomas Jefferson died on July 4th. John Adams also died on July 4th. They both died on the same day, which is just mind-blowing to think about. Uh, I think uh Jefferson died first. The the story I remember reading is that John Adams said, or Jefferson lives, I think was his last words, but uh in fact, Jefferson had died a few hours before. So for two guys that uh politically were on opposite spectrums and then obviously had a great friendship later after they were presidents in their lives, their letters is really wonderful to read. So uh very cool little fun facts about these two.

Sean Applegate 4:12

Yeah.

Brian Lake 4:12

So well, what about you, Brian? I mean, I I I gotta be honest, the original American Renaissance man, Mr. Benjamin Franklin, he's my favorite founding father, true only person to have signed both uh no, not both, the Declaration of Independence, the Paris Peace Treaty that ended the American Revolution, and the Constitution. He's the only one who signed all three documents. So that's fun fact number one. Second, uh, he was the first person to name, identify, not necessarily identify, because I think sailors had obviously identified this, but named the Gulf Stream and actually printed a map of the Gulf Stream. Uh, and third, uh, he was actually, we we all know he was a big scientist and experimenter, which I I do love about the Founding Fathers when you don't have social media, you have a lot of time to think and you're experimenting and looking at things. And obviously, he was a very uh big experimenter, but he experimented around kites, not just with the electricity experiments, right? But using kites to move uh ships and people. So he was actually a kite surfer. You can imagine Benjamin Franklin out there holding onto the kite and moving across the water.

Sean Applegate 5:28

So I'm imagining those flowing luxury with the wind blowing.

Brian Lake 5:32

Right, right, with the bald top, right? So yeah, so so yeah, that's my guy. On top of a myriad of other things, between the postmaster general, uh first ambassadors to France. I mean, he was just a he was a great guy. Yeah, pretty cool cat. Yeah, for sure. I and I think honestly, he would have been a podcaster. He had a lot of things to say, he had a lot of opinions about things. I think he would have really thrived in the podcast. Well, he certainly published a lot of stuff, so I think he would have taken advantage of all the technology at his disposal.

Why The Show Is Short

Brian Lake 6:00

100%. So, well, listen, folks, we know everybody's had a short week or they're still on vacation. So we thought we wanted to talk a little bit about some of this. This is the gist of government IT. Uh, we love this podcast, but it's one part of the larger gist program. And we have a lot of events coming up, uh, both in-person and digital activities that are going to be talking about some really important topics in the government IT space. So we figured today we're gonna keep the podcast nice and short for you, really snackable if you're out there on the beach or if you're sitting uh sitting on your boat or just sitting trying to stay cool here in the DC region. Uh, but we figured we'd talk about some of the events that are coming up, and we really encourage you if you're gonna be around uh either in the northern Virginia region or the DC region, or if you're gonna be uh if you if you have the ability to listen in on some of the virtual events to sign up

Securing IT IoT And OT

Brian Lake 6:49

and join. So, first one, Sean, on July 14th at the National Press Club, we have a breakfast briefing that's gonna be focusing on it's called When the Perimeter Disappears, securing the Converged Federal Enterprise across IT, IoT, and OT. And obviously, OMBM 2614 just came out. Uh, so this is a kind of really relevant topic, really top of mind in the government space right now. So, talk us a little bit about what's what's the focus of this breakfast briefing? What are we gonna be talking about, and um who who's gonna be speaking alongside with you?

Sean Applegate 7:20

Yeah, absolutely. So I think we're gonna dive into more tangible activities and what's happening, and also I think how to navigate those. If you're if you're a CISO in an agency or a security architect, what should you expect? So I think you'll be able to walk away with a lot of feedback from from a couple key individuals. One, um, Dr. Justin Ebert, he's a director of cyber protection at U.S. Department of Transportation. So he's he's had a lot of purview there to protect lots of different OT and systems, especially when you think of some of the investments we're making around FAA and new uh air traffic control systems or modernizing those big thing for everyday citizens to make sure that they're secure. Second, we have Randy Resnick, senior advisor for the Zero Trust Portfolio Management Office at the Department of War CIO. So this is the man for Zero Trust and DOD. Again, they both organizations, uh, when you think of FSEBS as a group on our civilian agencies and Department of War came out with big pushes early in the year around OT Zero Trust guidance. Yep. And more recently, M2614 around logging reference architectures, which a big part was adding better coverage so we have more data to better protect IoT and OT. So there's some big pushes there. You'll learn a lot about that. The one thing I think that's important for most organizations to understand is whether you're in a cyber professional or if you're an OT systems owner, working and collaborating together is really important because we're seeing those cyber attacks and OT accelerate. And often that's that soft underbelly of an of an agency that maybe doesn't have as much cybersecurity oversight historically and views into it. And also those OT protocols, I mean, we think of what we're talking about surging, right? 84% surge in 2025 on those attacks in that environment. So a lot of fun things to learn. Right. Uh, but I think you're gonna leave with a lot of practical insights and actionable steps. That's the main thing.

Brian Lake 9:10

And and our friend who's actually been on the podcast, Mr. Matthew Schallbetter, he's the director of civilian strategy over at Armis, who's also gonna be speaking at that event. And he didn't even get into some of the OT security stories on the podcast last time. So I'm sure he's gonna have a lot of other interesting topics to talk about.

Fireside Chat With CISA Director

Brian Lake 9:27

Um, the same day, it's gonna be July 14th is gonna be a busy day, my friend. Um so the same day at the evening time frame, we have the mid-year federal IT priority setting and listening session at the Riggs rooftop, downtown Washington, D.C. It's 9th and E, I believe, 5:30 to 7:30. So the director of SISA, Mr. Nick Anderson, is going to be sitting down and doing a fireside chat with you. So talk us a little bit about kind of some of the fun things that you're excited to talk to Nick about after this event.

Sean Applegate 9:58

Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I you know, I think Nick's one of those uh hands-on engineers. So he's amazing, knows what he's doing, and he's led this frontline both uh in industry for people like Lumen as well as doing it in the Department of Energy and other places in CISO role. So I'm excited to work with him. He's also had a lot of exposure to the Marine Corps over the day, his early years. So I'm excited to kind of mix it up on the Marine Corps theme a little bit, possibly if we do some throwback conversations. But at the end of the day, we're really gonna talk about you know, what IT investments have we made, what's SISA doing, um, how's that gonna impact FSEBs and also critical infrastructure sectors of America? So I think they've done a bunch of interesting things with technology investments. We think of SIM as a service with Elastic, building those motions, being able to do stuff that is much more in the weeds, protection, real protection, not just rolled up things like CMDB dashboards where they're an abstraction of an abstraction. So I'm excited to see how that uh individual data is going to be leveraged at SISA. And also I think when we look at their efforts around uh logging reference architecture in 2614, hopefully maybe by then we'll see some released details. So ideally we get to dive into the details, or maybe if if they're not out yet, maybe you can lean forward a little bit and uh give us a big preview of Burton.

Brian Lake 11:09

Yeah, sure, absolutely. So if you're in the DC region, stop by after work.

Continuous Threat Exposure Management

Brian Lake 11:14

The event starts at 5 30. So then the following week, now this isn't a folks can't attend this event, but there will be an after-action report that's cut that comes from it. We're doing an ATARC roundtable around operationalizing continuous threat exposure management. So talk to us a little bit about the types of questions and insights you're really excited about hearing from the the senior IT leaders that will be participating in this roundtable. And like I said, uh about two weeks afterwards, we will have a full after action report that will be available to folks to be read and downloaded on the website.

Sean Applegate 11:49

Sure. When we think of continuous threat exposure management, a lot of this is those internet-facing systems that are open to compromise. Yep. And so thinking of uh you know, and some of the dark web-related things too. So when you think of the social media profiles, the uh stolen and data for your employees and your executives, um, and or protecting their privacy, right? Looking at your external agencies' view into the world, maybe some of the uh the other kind of trends and and topics happening on the dark web, what's being looked at and talked about for threat intelligence. And then more importantly, we think of red team testing. So think of uh vulnerability vulnerability management, but really about exploitability of those vulnerabilities. So what's really your priorities you have to fix quickly, and how do we not only manage those things continuously, but maybe how do we remit them, remediate those things extremely efficiently too? So I'm excited to see what that looks like. Now I think you'll you'll find we'll hopefully have a well-rounded representation of the federal government in the round table. So I'm interested to hear the differences between maybe the civilian agencies versus what we hear in Department of War or EIC and whether that comes out in the report or not.

Brian Lake 12:53

And if folks haven't participated in these roundtables, they're Chatham House rules, so nothing's attributable, but you're getting firsthand insights from folks that are across the IT landscape in the federal government, what they're working on, the challenges they're having. So really excited for that conversation for you. All right, let's fast forward a little bit um to some digital events.

Edge To Enterprise Infrastructure Webinar

Brian Lake 13:12

So uh on August 13th, we're gonna be having a webinar entitled the the From the Edge to the Enterprise, and it's gonna be talking about the future of mission critical infrastructure. So talk to us a little bit what that actually means because obviously it's a pretty broad statement here. But we have uh Francisco Salguero, who's the director of enterprise information technology at the OCIO at the Department of Air Force, is gonna be speaking, as well as Preston Wentz, who's the acting CIO over at CISA, along with Ken Rich, who's the federal CTO over at HPE. So really well-rounded uh panel of presenters for this webinar. Talk to us a little bit about what you're excited to talk about for this webinar.

Sean Applegate 13:51

Yeah, and I think when we talk about mission critical infrastructure in this case, we'll really focus on the maybe the more AI piece of that in this talk track. So, you know, we've talked a lot about OT and IoT, but this is really gonna be a little more AI-driven infrastructure conversation. So if we need to build those data centers out, that critical infrastructure, what are the pieces and parts? Um, how do we build automation and agentec workloads that are gonna be critical for operating uh future mission systems? And how do we also protect those to some extent? But this one's really gonna be a lot more focused on building, innovating, and operating those things. And so I think you'll get a bit of views in each of those functions. And when you think of this, this is really with a CIO, uh set of CIOs, right? So they're gonna be talking about what do they want to build, how are they building it, how do they go about that. So I think you'll get a good view into the leadership's view into doing those things at scale. Yeah. And how they not only look at the technology, but the people and a process around that as well, and how they build the team, enable the team to be successful, and maybe some of the best practices or or mechanisms they want to leverage to do that.

Brian Lake 14:52

When you're a CIO, you're not just thinking about the immediacy in front of you. You've got to be thinking three years out, right? And what what those priorities are uh from an investment standpoint, from a people and process standpoint.

Sean Applegate 15:04

Yeah, and one thing, again, we we try to balance these things out. So there's lots of value across the government, we get shared lessons learned. So having representation from CISA as well as the Department of the Air Force, I think we'll see some interesting differences between how they approach things. Um, you know, often in in the Air Force, we think of things like D Dill, D Dill scenarios for deployed operations, um, classified networks. It's CISA, they're a younger, newer agency. They often lean in on cloud first, pretty heavy at DHS. So I'm interested to see the differences and some of the discussions and their approaches.

Tactical Edge Command Resiliency

Brian Lake 15:35

Right. So, and then finally, August 25th, uh last webinar of what I would call the summer before we enter into the last month of the fiscal year, rethinking command and control resiliency at the tactical edge. Now, I'm not an ex-marine like you, but I I've worked with Department of War, Department of Defense customers for many years, and the tactical edge is very, very different. Uh, you're talking about rigid infrastructure, legacy, antiquated, running on host nation networks. Talk to us a little bit about like how you're gonna frame this conversation about what the future looks like for this kind of community and this and this sort of technology. Sure. Yeah.

Sean Applegate 16:14

So when you think of weapons platforms, drones, sensors, vehicles, um, other things, uh, sensors of things, Jad C2 could be a bit of that too, right? When you think about to get things back and use it, we're gonna really focus on how do we connect those things into the environment? How do we get that data back? What are those non-traditional mechanisms look like? And then from a software-defined architecture, how do we facilitate that at a global scale? Right. Um, when you think of uh things like SD-WAN today, it really allows us to do some creative things when you think of tactical kits as well, which maybe isn't necessarily a weapons platform, but they're often the first thing kind of on the ground in a country. And and when we think about that, we can operate those things on satellite in a lot of cases, uh 5G connectivity through commercial transport. We can do it through local transport in countries as well. But how to do that at scale, really tricky. When you think of doing that securely on drones that connect through commercial environments, for example, or out to maybe your star shield environment through the cloud, how you tie that together, how you secure that, how you make sure it's performant, and how you drive uh a good zero trust architecture as well, um, both at the network and the application layer and identity and potentially push AI processing as close as possible to those weapons systems in a secure architecture. Pretty complex set of things to do. We're gonna really dive into that. Uh, we're gonna have Colonel Rhett Burroughs out there. He's the chief of mission command systems for force development directorate for the U.S. Army, what's called the DAG 8. And we're gonna have Ian Kelly there, senior director for solutions, engineering, and cloud flare. So these are folks that are doing these things in the Department of War, doing some pretty creative approaches. I think you're gonna get a uh a pretty deep view into what's the art of the possible. And as an old Marine that used satellite systems for deployed back in the 90s, and I've supported in my time at Packet here and Riverbed some pretty interesting SATCOM programs over the years. I've uh had some discussions here already, and I think it's game-changing what we're seeing in today's world where we can greatly simplify architectures, drive much better performance for the warfighter, and a more secure experience for not just the warfighter, but the I'll call it the AI agents or AI-powered bots, you know, physical robots around them or the drones. So pretty exciting view of this. Um, and again, these things don't necessarily cost more money either. So I think we'll get a bit into the cost or return on investment on taxpayer dollars, possibly

Register And Final Takeaways

Sean Applegate 18:33

as well. Right.

Brian Lake 18:33

Well, listen, all of these events are gonna be very exciting. Really great content, really great conversations are gonna be had. Go to gist360.com, check out the uh the different activities, the different events, register, sign up, participate. We'd love to have you, and we'll make sure that everything's in the show notes. But Sean, happy birthday, America, 250 years, looking forward to the next 250 years, and we'll hope to see you at these events coming up soon. We'll see you there. All right. Cheers.