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ASSYST's OnPoint xChange Data Dialogs presents excerpts from an insightful conversation between Vinay Shirke, ASSYST CIO, and Eugene Goldlust, Senior Account Executive, with a special focus on Cybersecurity. In their first exchange, Vinay and Eugene spoke about how a Security Data Lake (SDL) solution improves holistic Threat Intelligence for organizations by providing Actionable Insights. They discussed how an SDL could enhance and provide complete visibility to system stakeholders that are filtered out or missing from an SIEM solution, a traditional data warehouse, and the multitude of other third-party security endpoint tools that organizations deploy.
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June 12, 2023, Sterling, VA: ASSYST is celebrating its 30th anniversary, a remarkable milestone in providing transformative solutions and exceptional customer service. Over the years, ASSYST has been devoted to driving innovation and empowering businesses, positioning the company as a reliable partner for organizations seeking best-in-class solutions. By continuously evolving to support mission and enterprise initiatives, ASSYST has numerous accomplishments establishing the company as The One Point of Source for Transforming Your Business.
When we began, the focus was on providing customers with exceptional engineering capabilities and professional consulting services for modernizing applications and implementing ERP solutions, primarily for the international banking and finance sector and several Fortune 500 companies.
Strategically located in the National Capital Region (NCR), we were able to expand into other sectors and markets, such as State and Local government and non-profit organizations. As our strategy broadened from providing primarily engineering and professional consulting services, we began managing programs and implementing and supporting mission systems for the US Federal government sector.
Some of our earlier accomplishments contributing to ASSYST's expansion and growth include competing and securing a number of long-term IT service contracts with State governments and various County governments in and around Washington, DC, and Baltimore. Other significant accomplishments involved establishing long-term GSA Schedules, including IT Schedule 70, HACS, Health IT, and Cloud 518210C. Some of the more significant IDIQ GWAC contracts contributing to our growth, and where ASSYST competed and successfully performed, include GSA Alliant SB, SEC DIOMDS, CMS SPARC, and Army CHESS ITES-3S.
As we celebrate 30 years of employee contributions and exemplary customer service, ASSYST continues to expand and grow our business in areas of regulatory, healthcare, defense, and other sectors and industries. We continue to broaden our service capabilities and expand our solution development activities as we further invest in innovation through our Green Accelerator Program.
As we recognize employee contributions and customer loyalty, please join me, raise a glass, and hold it high, to celebrate ASSYST's many achievements supporting over 30 US Federal government customers, multiple State and Local governments and departments, several Fortune 500 companies, and the non-profit sector. The future is bright and promising.
With the utmost appreciation and admiration to ASSYST employees, our customers, and partners, past and present, we thank you.
With warm personal regards,
As ASSYST celebrates its 30th anniversary, it looks forward to continuing service excellence and bringing innovation to our customers to empower government, businesses, and non-profits with transformative solutions.
The advent of modern technology concepts and the emerging growth in Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) have unlocked a world of possibilities for improving healthcare data objectives. Here we have members of ASSYST’s Hephaestus Product Development Team; Padmaraj Viswanathan, a Solution Architect and AI/ML Engineer at ASSYST's Green Accelerator Program for Hephaestus, sits down with John Kimberl, an experienced Health Data Solutions Analyst to exchange ideas, explore the possibilities and delve into the potential of Generative AI and its role in facilitating Health Data Interoperability. Exploring this topic can uncover ideas supporting crucial health data operations for smooth data exchange, informed decision-making, and improving patient-centered care and public health initiatives.
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Khalil Zebdi, ASSYST's EVP for Federal Business Development, describes the significance, benefits, and value of our unique ISSO-as-a-Service (ISSOaaS) Cyber Security offering.
In a time where cyber security’s importance is imperative, staffing expert security specialists can be tasking. Impending cyber threats are inevitable, and requirements to maintain system security are ever-changing. Recruiting costs and resources for obtaining Cyber Security talent are rising annually. Time-consuming efforts to recruit, onboard, and provide standard compliance certifications can be cumbersome and hinder budgets. This creates a challenge for business owners, CIOs, CISOs, and HR leadership in managing cyber personnel to support Risk Averse Systems.
For organizations seeking to improve systems security, yet encounter the same constraints as described above, ASSYST can be the right partner. Our ISSO (Information Systems Security Officer) as a Service (ISSOaaS) program, a Cyber Security Service Offering, is designed to meet the scalable security challenges your organization faces with a seasoned cyber workforce ready to face the unique requirements for your business.
ASSYST’s ISSO as a Service is “Delivering Industry Certified and Proven Cyber Security Experts to Support your Cyber Security Mission.” Our ISSO personnel will engage with your organization’s systems as outlined in your organization’s guidelines and policies. In addition, ISSOaaS can support business owners by Rapidly Providing Adaptable Security Professionals knowledgeable with industry best practices to support your organization’s Cyber Mission Assurance.
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ASSYST's OnPoint xChange Data Dialogs presents excerpts from an insightful conversation between Vinay Shirke, ASSYST CIO, and Eugene Goldlust, Senior Account Executive, with a special focus on Cybersecurity solutions.
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ASSYST COO Joe Anderson and VP of Technical Solutions Vijay Narasimhan reflect on the remarkable growth in delivering capabilities to customers in the areas of DevSecOps, containers, and microservices.
Vijay Narasimhan leads service delivery across Federal Civilian and DoD and is the principal architect of ASSYST’s Green Accelerator Program. The Green Accelerator Program is our innovation lab and incubator program where we perform customer-focused applied research utilizing open technology in the cloud infrastructure. Vijay’s focus includes native architectures, cloud-agnostic development, cloud hopping, collaborative coding, interoperability, and automation.
In addition to his role as the COO, Mr. Anderson leads several prominent programs in the Federal marketplace, providing consultation for IT and business leaders on several leading-edge technology areas, including multi-cloud, AI/ML, microservices, shift-left implementation approaches, robotic process automation, and zero-trust architecture implementation.
Joe Anderson: Hello Vijay. I find it promising to see the Federal sector embracing DevSecOps, and I know our engineering teams are excited about this transformational shift. I’m seeing a strong correlation between Agile, DevSecOps, and cloud migration within our customer base, and the number of opportunities is growing. I think the advancements in open technology and new approaches to security have helped fuel the growth in opportunities for businesses like ours. The growth certainly provides better opportunities for our UCD/UXD designers, DevSecOps engineers, cloud architects, and Pipeline engineers. I’m noticing that our customers who are truly committed to the practice are becoming more interested in using cross-cloud platforms and/or cloud-native approaches for their applications because of a greater emphasis on portability. I’ve also noticed that our engineers are becoming more adept at writing code and developing applications to run on or are portable to any cloud environment. In this way, DevSecOps and open-technology are really delivering on the promises.
Vijay Narasimhan: What I like about transforming our delivery teams to DevSecOps is how collaborative our Agile teams have become. In the past, the interaction between UCD/UXD, infrastructure, pipeline, configuration, back-end engineers, and front-end developers occurred when there was a major release or at a defined phase gate. With DevSecOps, the collaboration between the team members is happening hourly and daily across these areas of responsibility. Anyone can be brought into a daily standup or a huddle, and barriers and/or roadblocks are resolved almost instantaneously, keeping the development process moving forward. I’m also noticing how quickly the DevSecOps team comes together and socializes, and you can see how it is more engaging and rewarding to the team members.
Joe Anderson: I continue to be impressed by the maturity and sophistication of the DevSecOps tools, especially in the area of automation with respect to security, CI/CD pipeline activities, configuration and branching strategies, and Agile processes. The ability to monitor and measure all of the activities in the environment and present the information in a single window pane or dashboard is an elegant solution for tracking performance. Additionally, the emergence of process automation in the DevSecOps environment results in faster time to market and a significant reduction in errors and defects. The ability to automatically identify, categorize, and prioritize incidents and vulnerabilities, automate and enforce the code branching strategy, or automate the test, build, and deploy process are accelerating Sprint cycles.
Vijay Narasimhan: That’s right Joe. The number of processes you can automate in the DevSecOps environment continues to grow and mature. Also, many of these technologies come with built-in analytics capability, which is very helpful. One of the areas I am focused on is working with our customers to aggregate and present the analytics utilizing the DevSecOps tool-chain for infrastructure, pipeline, configuration, back-end, front-end, and UCD/UXD activities into a customer-specific dashboard to capture and display the most important metrics for measuring performance and the business impact. The other positive outcome we are experiencing on our delivery teams is a heightened awareness across the different areas of responsibility amongst team members. For example, if the infrastructure is performing security patches or upgrading CI/CD tools, the backend and front-end engineers are immediately aware, and if there is a potential impact to a Sprint cycle, they’ll huddle, walk through any issues, resolve any potential roadblocks, and pivot resources to keep the build on schedule.
Joe Anderson: I see more of our customers’ environments are supported remotely and most of our DevSecOps teams are working in a virtualized infrastructure environment in the cloud. It’s become apparent to me that for the mission and enterprise systems we are supporting, and especially those systems with high availability and high volume requirements that Kubernetes container orchestration is becoming an increasingly more important service and skill provided by our cloud architects and administrators. What I find both empowering and inspiring is how our DevSecOps teams are utilizing Kubernetes for deploying and managing containerized applications and we have fully integrated Kubernetes with our CI/CD processes.
Vijay Narasimhan: Yes, continuing to expand our capabilities in Kubernetes container orchestration and utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for provisioning virtualized computing resources to support our DevSecOps teams and customers is a primary focus of mine. The speed at which we can set up development, quality control, and production environments and deploy Agile teams for our customers is unparalleled. The performance improvements we are seeing with Kubernetes in AWS and/or Azure are significant, and our ability to integrate Kubernetes with our other CI/CD pipeline tools and development environment has reduced delivery schedules significantly. The ease of provisioning and configuring the technologies you need to develop, enhance or modernize a system is a major factor in improving delivery schedules and quality.
Joe Anderson: ASSYST is fortunate in that the partnerships we have established with AWS, Azure, RedHat, and GCP, and the investments we have made in DevSecOps, containerization, and microservices enable us to provide our customers with innovative approaches specific to their systems, applications and operating environment. Our customers have difficulty keeping up with technology changes impacting tool selection, adoption, and new technologies, and sometimes struggle to understand how it fits into their existing operating environment. These distractions are resulting in activities that deviate from the core business. I think deviations away from the core business because of technology changes is a key driver behind the importance of UCD/UXD/IXD design activities within the DevSecOps team. When the user experience is integral to the DevSecOps team, you can begin to achieve frictionless services and faster paths to a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Then, based on the user experience patterns and metrics, we enhance the product's features using low-code approaches and microservices. More and more this is what our customers are expecting.
Vijay Narasimhan: I’m glad that you are bringing up the importance of frictionless services and how we are approaching this with customers. I think you have succinctly outlined the DevSecOps path to frictionless services and digital transformation. An area I am focusing on is how to utilize the DevSecOps toolchain to provide customers the ability to measure the business impact of the DevSecOps team. For example, analyzing real-time interactions of UCD/UXD/IXD, front-end, back-end, pipeline, configuration, and infrastructure activities. This is currently an initiative of our Green Accelerator Program with interest from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Food and Drug Administration, Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Our customers need DevSecOps to provide frictionless services, and for them to transform and succeed using this new delivery model, then we as service providers need to provide solutions where customers can easily measure our performance based on the user experience.
User expectations are soaring daily as web and mobile platforms are increasingly used to deliver digital services. As a result, design, architecture, and application development timelines are shrinking using Cloud, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), DevOps, and Off-the-Shelf technologies. While Security and Compliance remain the core concerns, the need to deliver defect-free products (products that provide frictionless services to users) and services at the speed of business remains a high priority for Agency CIOs and Product Owners.
Vinay Shirke, CIO at ASSYST, joins OnPoint xChange to discuss Product Quality and explain how his team innovates and delivers significant value to Federal Government Customers.
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