AWS’ Brett McMillen on Cloud Adoption in Federal Government

Brett McMillen, director of federal government at Amazon Web Services, told FedScoop in a video interview posted Wednesday that the company has seen meaningful progress in federal information technology modernization as agencies realize the benefits of cloud adoption.

He noted that several agencies are moving mission-critical applications to the cloud and are adopting DevOps Agile model and enterprisewide strategies.

“Enterprisewide strategies include things like ATOs for entire agencies and acquisition strategies that make it easy for anybody to use these best-of-breed modern technologies, whether it is cloud, machine learning or artificial intelligence.”

McMillen also discussed how AWS works to help agencies improve their cybersecurity posture as they move to the cloud, such as providing tools like the GuardDuty intrusion detection platform to enable agencies to respond to cyber threats.

The company implements programs to help retrain the federal workforce and develop the future workforce, McMillen said.

“But we also think we need to catch that next generation coming up. So for example, we work with the Northern Virginia Community College to come up with the cloud computing associate degree. These students are coming out with the tools they need to help the government move into modern technologies,” he added.