3 2 JILL SINGER first entered the secretive world of national intelligence right out of college. She began coding mission applications at the CIA when information technology was still called automated data processing. Data sharing extended only as far as the local area network and the Arpanet—that first inkling of the Internet—had barely been invented. Today, that network of networks is the enabling technology supporting the information economy. It’s also fundamentally changing the very nature of intelligence. And agencies that helped invent the information age are suddenly finding themselves challenged to keep up with the accelerated pace of technology. Singer understands how this all happened, better than most. She helped build the mission systems and solutions those agencies depend on, over a career that saw her rise to deputy chief information officer at CIA and CIO at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). In those roles within the United States Intelligence Community (IC), she had to balance mission against budget to obtain the greatest capabilities at the least possible cost. Now Vice President of National Security for AT&T Public Sector, her focus and priorities remain unchanged. “I’m as invested in this mission as I ever was,” Singer says. The difference: “Now I have the ability to put the resources of the largest communications company in the U.S. into the hands of my IC customers.” Network Modernization The federal government will spend $95 billion on information technology in 2018, including both unclassified and classified systems. But only about 20 percent of that is available to invest in new technology and capabilities. The remainder—roughly $76 billion—is needed to keep legacy systems operational. That’s why IT modernization is a national priority, attracting the interest of both the White House and Congress. The federal government has been locked in a bind. It lacks the resources to keep up with the pace of change in the industry and the technology to both maintain and replace a host of legacy systems. Consider something as critical as the network—the backbone of any information enterprise. AT&T has invested $145 billion over the past 5 years (2013-2017) to modernize its global network, refreshing and innovating along the way. That’s more than the federal government has spent on new IT systems across the entire federal enterprise in the same time frame. The basic building blocks of network technology—routers, firewalls, switches—are essentially the same whether deployed on an enterprise or global scale. But the sophistication needed to maximize the efficiency, security and reliability of that network—and to do so at the lowest possible cost—keeps growing, Singer explains. With every new innovation, the leaders move further ahead and the followers fall further behind. The answer, she argues, lies in moving to a managed service model where an expert provider is responsible for the technology and its operation. If that sounds familiar, it should—it’s just like the shift from data centers to cloud services that’s taken place over the past decade. When the CIA invited a large cloud services provider to launch its commercial cloud services (C2S) five years ago, it was an explicit recognition that the provider could deliver something the CIA could not—high-speed, high-performance commercial-grade computing and storage services in a secure, classified environment. “We called it commercial cloud services for a reason,” CIA Chief Information Officer John Edwards would later explain. “We want the speed of commercial, the speed of that innovation, the best of breed.” Networks present an almost identical challenge. It’s not that federal agencies can’t manage their own networks. Rather, it’s that a global network provider like AT&T can do it better for less. LEADING THE FUTURE