Charles Lyons-Burt
Since his days working in intelligence operations and imagery mission supervision, exploitation and analysis support for U.S. Central Command’s Air Forces Forward Operations in the 1990s and 2000s, Samuel Unger has been laser-focused on the intersection where defense and intelligence activities meet. This, coupled with training in systems engineering and solution architecture, has primed him for a two-and-a-half-decade career providing expertise in geospatial intelligence to organizations like TASC, Engility, Raytheon and BlackSky. As of March 2023, he is senior director of business development and sales at SAP NS2.
Unger celebrated his two-year anniversary at the company with a Spotlight interview that seeks to clear up common misconceptions about cloud, lay out SAP’s various transformative offerings and demonstrate how these applications are able to “analyze vast datasets rapidly, identifying patterns and anomalies that would otherwise remain hidden.”
ExecutiveBiz: What opportunities can be unlocked with the cloud, and how do you think those opportunities will change the federal landscape?
Samuel Unger: It is an interesting and transformative time for cloud enablement across markets. While on the one hand, markets are experiencing significant benefits from iterative adoption of artificial intelligence technologies (think agentic AI), organizations are beginning to rethink or reevaluate how they approach cloud utilization, particularly within the federal landscape. This reevaluation is creating the space for organizations to take advantage of a myriad opportunities to optimize their workloads and outputs.
As cloud service providers’ offerings expand across security domains, organizations have more options to define their infrastructure and platform(s) to maximize their agility, allowing them to focus on critical priorities, such as enhanced security, data management and operational efficiencies.
The federal landscape is beginning to take advantage of and adopt secure, sovereign and/or private cloud offerings. In an era of increased cyber threats against national security interests, sovereign clouds offer the benefits of cloud adoption. Sovereign clouds provide peace of mind of compliant, protected, data-centric security tailored to meet organizational needs within national borders. Organizations can move faster knowing the threats of foreign access or influence on critical government data is mitigated. They can prioritize modernization of legacy IT systems, knowing data is protected and compliant with regulations and policies. This is a huge opportunity to evaluate, decommission, update, or replace outdated systems throughout the federal landscape that have slowed its ability to fully embrace software-driven solutions and innovation. SAP NS2 is in an advantageous position being both CSP-agnostic and the sovereign cloud provider for federal customers across all security domains.
EBiz: What are some of the key barriers that remain in widespread federal cloud migration, and how do you think we can overcome them?
Unger: There are several, but I’ll share my top three: 1. security and compliance; 2. complexity of legacy IT systems; 3. cloud cost understanding and management.
First, security and compliance primarily revolve around policies and regulations, data management, and the pervasiveness of continuous cyberthreats. A critical and perhaps the largest barrier is the misconception that on-premises systems are more secure than cloud solutions and that is simply not true. Cloud providers are in the security business first and foremost. Organizations hesitant to move to the cloud should consider “total cost of security” and quickly recognize the scalability, segmentation and accessibility to innovation allowing organizations to adapt at the speed of evolving threats.
Accelerated migration requires policy and regulation adjustments allowing organizations to move within days to weeks instead of months. Reciprocity of authorized and/or accredited cloud services across all orgs within a specific security domain would rapidly advance migration. Data sensitivities are legitimate concerns, but I believe that can be overcome with education and understanding of how data is protected throughout the migration process. When providers articulate how data is prepared, catalogued, protected, migrated and stored while adhering to controls and policies, organizations are prepared and reassured as they embrace their migration journey.
Second, legacy IT systems are complex, customized and often considered critical to operational needs. This introduces several challenges such as compatibility, availability, performance and affordability within an enterprise. As new technologies/capabilities became available, they would be integrated with the legacy systems, resulting in systems so entrenched that interfaces and impacts are not understood. So the systems persist. There is an interesting parallel between the physical systems affected during the Base Realignment and Closure, or BRAC, endeavors 15-20 years ago and today’s digital landscape. Like the “retire, lift/shift, or replace” then, now it is “migrate, modernize, replace, or retire”. Modernized planning allows organizations to prioritize and budget for phased approaches to minimize disruption throughout a transition. Planning includes accounting for application refactoring and re-platforming enabled through containerization and micro-service architectures to improve portability and scalability.
The tradeoffs will be between operational or mission criticality against access to innovation and technologies at both pace and scale. As organizations adopt efficient, outcomes-oriented priorities, I anticipate a strong emphasis on legacy IT system transformation.
Third, cloud cost management is essential. Early adoption, outside of system restructuring, resulted in unplanned costs, leaving negative perception of cloud utilization. Let’s be clear — cloud cost management is essential to a successful cloud journey and enduring success. One of our significant achievements was implementing a true software-as-a-service model with a national security customer wherein SAP NS2 manages both the SAP applications (SAP ERP Central Component and SAP S/4HANA) and the cloud infrastructure on behalf of our customer. Our customers focus on their mission(s) while we utilize monitoring and analytics tools to track resource utilization, through automation and right-sizing, based on utilization and demands. This is an invaluable benefit to our customers throughout the federal landscape and is serving as an enabler for increased adoption.
EBiz: Data must be collected, analyzed and understood in order to be used effectively. What are some of the key challenges and opportunities you’re seeing emerge as organizations harness data and use it to drive decisions?
Unger: Data sovereignty and security are paramount. A key challenge is managing highly sensitive data across disparate systems and security classifications. We see agencies struggling to break down data silos while adhering to strict compliance regulations.
However, this challenge presents a massive opportunity. With our secure cloud and several data management solutions, we enable organizations to unify data, fostering a “single source of truth.” This empowers them to derive actionable insights, improving mission effectiveness and decision-making.
Another critical challenge is the sheer volume and velocity of data. Organizations need real-time analytics to detect and respond to operational needs and threats. This is where our in-memory computing through solutions such as SAP HANA and AI capabilities excel. We empower organizations to analyze vast datasets rapidly, identifying patterns and anomalies that would otherwise remain hidden.
Furthermore, we see a growing need for explainable AI. Agencies require transparency into how AI algorithms arrive at conclusions, especially when dealing with critical decisions. SAP NS2 is committed to providing solutions that balance innovation with accountability. This includes delivering SAP’s recently announced Business Data Cloud, a significant and transformative evolution in data management to the federal landscape.
Ultimately, we are enabling agencies to transform data into a strategic asset, driving mission success in a secure and compliant environment.
EBiz: What kind of tools and technologies can organizations use to make their data more accessible and understandable?
Unger: This is tough because there are so many tools available and different organizations have different needs. Still, there are essential fundamentals and principles that should not be overlooked, such as: unification and governance, compatibility, virtualization, cataloging, warehousing, provenance, auditing, accuracy, and consistency. Interactive dashboards and visualizations are essential to making data understandable and enabling decision-making and insights.
SAP NS2 is leveraging components of SAP’s Business Data Cloud, today, through Datasphere (unified single semantic layer and virtualization), SAP Analytics Cloud (predictive analytics, business intelligence and interaction driven by NLP for data-driven insights), and Business Warehouse. SAP BDC includes a strategic alliance with Databricks, bridging the gap between business data and advanced data science and AI capabilities. Of course, SAP HANA, an in-memory database platform providing high-performance data processing for real-time insights, remains a core component and foundation of several SAP solutions.
SAP HANA has proven particularly invaluable in highly sensitive environments and even more so when paired with a uniquely designed solution called DataCTRL. Deployed either on-premises or in the cloud, DataCTRL leverages both commercial and open-source technologies to handle any workload and data type while managing classification, labeling, and providing data auditing and provenance capabilities.
In essence, SAP NS2 offers several data management tools and technologies to meet any need within the federal landscape.
