Brett McMillen has been at the forefront of the federal government’s move to cloud computing for the last decade. An engineer by training, McMillen has devoted most of his career helping government agencies harness innovative IT solutions, having worked for a number of leading telecommunications companies before joining AWS in 2011, where he now serves as Director of U.S. Federal Amazon Web Services.
McMillen has been recognized for his work helping the federal government make important information, such as the 1,000 Genome Project, available as public datasets on AWS and working with federal officials to obtain the FedRAMP certification for AWS.
FedScoop caught up with McMillen recently to get his current take on how agencies are moving forward with the cloud.
FedScoop: Government agencies are constantly being asked to do more with less. In many ways, the pandemic revealed that agencies were able to do more than many thought possible. Where did you see some great examples of that among federal agencies?
Brett McMillen: If you would have asked me when the pandemic started impacting agencies, where I would spend most of my time and effort, I would have said places like FDA and CDC and NIH. And yes, we did a lot of work there. But there were other agencies where the cloud definitely helped that we didn’t expect — for example, when the Small Business Administration was tasked with administrating the Paycheck Protection Program under the CARES Act. Virtually every bank in this country wanted to write loans against that. Yet, SBA didn’t have a good way to work with all the banks out there for a program like this. So we stepped in and helped them out and in just a few short weeks, they were able to offer a portal to all the banks to process those loans — worth $349 billion — that was able to go to protecting paychecks.
Another example was the U.S. Census Bureau. They’ve been doing the census since 1790. Yet up until this year, it’s really been done with pen and paper. This was the first time that they did it over the internet and leveraged modern technologies. We started working with them years ago to do that. And then the pandemic happened. It changed the way that they have to count — they weren’t able to do as many face to face interactions. And they had to shift timeframes because of the lockdown.
Because they were in the cloud, by far the majority of the nation was able to respond over the internet. And then, when things opened back up, they were able to quickly and easily scale up and scale down.
The other thing that they were able to do, that was really hard to do in previous ways, is (focus differently) on disaster recovery. Think about it: With pen and paper and traditional IT infrastructures, it gets really expensive to do proper disaster recovery. By moving this into a cloud environment, they were able to fairly quickly and easily do that…and have it super secure.
FedScoop: In some cases, the economic shutdown that followed the pandemic resulted in a big fall off in fees for some governmental agencies. Where did you see technology helping agencies innovate or optimize operations in response?
McMillen: So, some organizations really had to scale up like SBA. But other organizations, like U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — with the pandemic, there were less folks coming into this country, so they had a large drop in the fees they were receiving. We saw that at multiple agencies.
Agencies that built their systems in the cloud, that can both scale up and scale down easily — we were able to work with them, so that as their fees went down, that budget also went down too. That’s one of the beauties of moving into the cloud. You’re really never sure what you’re going to need or what the next crisis is going to be. Having every system ready to either scale up or scale down is really essential, so that you can meet those needs. So for people that were still coming here, needing visas and passports and everything else, CIS was still able to serve those people at a smaller expense.
FedScoop: Where else did you and your support teams at AWS see the innovative or progressive use of cloud services?
McMillen: When we first started in the cloud and had the “Cloud First” policy and the “25 Point Implementation Plan” in federal government, most agencies would say, ‘Let’s pick a workload to move into the cloud and try this out.” And that actually worked really well. As agencies began picking multiple workloads, they realized they needed to go into more of an enterprise-wide engagement, to enable anybody in their agency to move into the cloud. What we’ve gotten is whole groups of applications within an agency moving to the cloud for all the benefits of the cloud.
What’s really exciting now is, rather than looking at the applications that we have today, agencies are asking, “How would you solve this mission problem with the latest and greatest technologies?” And the organizations that do this the best are constantly looking at the new technologies that are coming out. That’s one of the beauties of cloud computing: It’s not just what AWS brings to the table; but it’s what all of our partners and everybody that builds on top of AWS are able to bring to the table.
We’re also seeing throughout the federal government are folks saying, “Alright, I’ve got this legacy application, but how could that run better?” With most of these things, it’s not just about replacing it with the latest and greatest technology, but it’s often about augmenting it.
At the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, for example, they’re in the business of giving states money to help people with programs like the Child Health Insurance Program. What CMS didn’t have was a good feedback mechanism on who’s really getting those benefits. They weren’t able to get really granular with the data and understand it. And so we worked with CMS and helped them build up these API’s on the portal interfaces to every state and every territory. So then they were able to answer questions like, “In this zip code, are enough below-poverty-income mothers getting the correct prenatal care that they need?” They’re actually able to understand the funding that goes out a little bit better and how it’s better serving the citizens.
FedScoop: What in your estimation made the difference in the way agencies were able to mobilize so quickly and productively through the pandemic?
McMillen: The agencies that were able to pivot really quickly had done some really fundamental things that every agency should do, to be able to utilize modern technology. Because when a pandemic happens, or any other unforeseen event happens, you really don’t know where you’re going to have to scale up and scale down.
They set up an acquisition vehicle ahead of time for their general operations that came in really handy when the pandemic happened. It made it so that anybody within that department can quickly and easily get to modern cloud technologies. They also had set up standard operating procedures. So if you’re going to deploy in the cloud, here’s how you do it securely. And what some other agencies had done was set up an ATO — authority to operate — that any organization within the agency can leverage.
By having some of those fundamentals, it made it easier to stand up a new system in the cloud; you didn’t have to do that the net foundational work again. Amazon is working with agencies to pull all these things together and build what we call landing zones — a compliant environment that meets that agency’s security and acquisition needs.
The other thing that was really helpful is, we’ve been working for a long time with government agencies around workforce modernization — helping to train employees on modern technologies to be able to quickly make the pivots that we were talking about.
FedScoop: What lessons from the pandemic suggest ways agencies can still accelerate their modernization efforts even with limited budgets?
McMillen: One of the lessons learned is when you’re serving the public, you’re not quite sure what it’s going to come up next. So agencies should really look at every system they have, and ask themselves, “Is that scalable up or down?” Unfortunately, too many of these systems were a bit built a very long time ago. They do not have that scaling capability.
The other thing that we see that’s super helpful is being able to inject modern technologies into existing systems. It’s not always an all-or-nothing thing. You can take a portion of that system and move it into a modern technology. Over time, what you’re doing is a continuous modernization or continuous improvement of those systems. And those agencies that take that philosophy are the ones that are able to pivot very quickly.
Finally, this pandemic isn’t going to end overnight. It’s going to be a long process. And people should utilize this process to do the right things to modernize to better serve the citizens.
Learn how AWS can help your agency capitalize on today’s cloud or contacting AWS at USFedFin@amazon.com.
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March 30, 2021 at 02:30AM
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AWS' US federal director talks about rapid response at agencies using the cloud - FedScoop
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