By Clara Conti, General Manager, Presidio Federal with guest Wayne Lewandowski

In the early days of the pandemic, a fact about our customers at numerous federal agencies became obvious: They needed more modern ways to support their clients. Those clients include all American citizens as well as the U.S. military.

The federal government has long needed to speed up its IT modernization, a fact which COVID-19 and remote work made impossible to ignore. Since I’m often checking in with peers and colleagues on how they are managing the new challenges brought by COVID, I decided to capture our discussions in a blog series. For the first one, I turned to Wayne Lewandowski, Senior Cyber Security Sales Leader and VP of Global Sales at Entrust.

Wayne has worked to bring innovative technologies into federal markets for more than 25 years, giving him great perspective on what federal agencies are doing in the cloud and what they want out of it.

When we caught up recently, I was interested to hear Wayne’s thoughts on the widespread shift to multicloud, how digital infrastructure has changed, and how he’s been able to network during the era of remote work. The highlights of our conversation follow.

The growth of multicloud

Momentum behind transitioning to the cloud was growing well before the pandemic arrived in 2020, and it has only snowballed since then. Value added integrators such as Presidio Federal quickly realized that secure cloud is not just the “next new thing” but a business necessity that must continue to evolve with the mission and with the sustained presence of COVID-19.

Wayne and I both see multicloud as a big area of expansion. A multicloud approach allows organizations to source different vendors for their cloud deployments—for example, using Amazon Web Services for some tasks alongside Azure and Google Cloud Platforms for others.

The push towards multicloud is a result of evolving technologies and priorities. In the early days of the cloud, organizations used the lift-and-shift approach to simply move apps and data from their on-premises storage into the cloud.

“Some legacy applications need to come over as they are, but we now have the opportunity to look at agile development and delivery which brings us into a container environment,” Wayne said.

The notion of DevSecOps in a docker container environment means using applications/worker nodes that may only live for more than minutes or hours vs. decades. This creates an “opportunity to infiltrate infrastructure, which is why security plays an ever-increasing role in this scenario. Containers and surge capacity is better suited for the cloud, which makes it an attractive alternative—but this creates a more complex enterprise to secure,” Wayne said.

Federal clients and those of us who work with them know the importance of getting there quickly and securely given fluctuations due to policy changes, new missions, or other cyclical events. In the past 16 months, government realized the need to speed its development processes—and increased funding toward IT modernization as a result.

As agencies make this move, they need to ensure citizenry access, government operations, and military operations are highly available and secure.

Redesigning effective customer sales channels

While Wayne and I have learned a lot about remote networking in the past year, there are still things we are figuring out. Given that we are both natural extroverts and networkers, a big part of who we are and what we do got virtualized. Now we need great content to help us start conversations with customers.

The sales model has changed on the government side. It’s now common for us to sell to customers we’ve never met, which was rarely the case pre-pandemic. Connecting with them requires some new tools, a forward-looking strategy, and a lot of creativity.

In years past, a sales connection was likely to start with an in-person meeting—at a conference, through a mutual connection, or some other organic encounter. Digital collaboration would follow. But that process has been turned on its head. Most initial engagements are currently digital, and if the initial engagement is promising, an in-person meeting follows to establish a connection and seal the deal.

“In the last several months, we’ve all gotten better at structuring virtual events that bring working groups together for private exchanges and validation of ideas with peers and prospects. It’s working pretty well,” Wayne said.

This makes digital lead acquisition approach extremely important. We’re constantly working to engage with audiences through newsletters, webinars, and other valuable content that’s relevant to our intended market.

Back to the office

Companies are beginning to realize what a widespread return to work will look like. We anticipate some resistance since working from home offers a strong work/life balance – especially since remote workspaces are becoming more sophisticated.

As an executive, I can see that the comfort level for remote work productivity is rising. But Wayne and I both feel that in-person team building and collaboration are vital. “Companies shouldn’t miss the opportunity to maintain culture and connected relationships by having people come into a corporate setting monthly or quarterly and have a beer,” Wayne said. “Office configurations will likely dispense with permanent offices and include smaller to medium size conference rooms and fewer cubicles.”

Presidio Federal designs solutions leveraging technologies from partners like Entrust, making discussion of government challenges and solutions an adrenaline rush for folks like us. I appreciate Wayne’s willingness to share his insights more broadly as part of this blog series.