Customers

Perspectives from the federal public sector: Enable mission success with Elastic

By
Steven Coles

After a year of accelerated change in the federal industry, the Federal Public Sector event focused on the progress you’ve made, the trends demanding your attention, and the Elastic capabilities that continue to guide federal agencies, offices, and departments towards a search-enabled future. 

With a theme of Accelerate the mission. Start with search, the ElasticON US Federal event centered around some key takeaways: 

  • Data volumes will increase regardless of the size, scape, or scope of your federal focus. Having the tools to adapt processes at speed and scale can be the difference between mission success or failure.
  • Whether your focus is to enable business visibility, optimize infrastructure and applications, or protect your digital ecosystem, the power of search is the catalyst for becoming an insights-driven organization.
  • Your security posture should center on a consolidated, unified analyst experience for security and observability in all operations. Elastic bridges the gap between all silos, operations, and domains to deliver a central hub for detecting, analyzing, and acting on all threats before they put the mission at risk.
  • Federal-specific concerns of speed, networking, accessibility, tracking, and data security are built into the latest releases so that Elastic can bring more responsiveness than ever to public sector projects.

Using the highlights below as a guide, learn how organizations across the federal government are leveraging Elastic to quickly analyze data, unify intelligence, standardize datasets, and achieve the mission faster.

Elastic Security in action

Easily the most spirited conversation of the event was Elastic Security in action, facilitated by Elastic’s Mike Nichols and John Harmon. Bringing together perspectives from both product and mission with Chris Johnson (Director, Cybersecurity Operations Center, NGA), Armando Seay (Co-Founder & Member Board of Directors, Maryland Innovation Security Institute), and Ed Yardley (Chief Engineer, Valiant), the session provided a comprehensive analysis of the cyber, cloud, supply chain, and compliance capabilities enabled by Elastic Security and how they stand up to the requirements of the federal government of tomorrow. The key to scalability, integration, risk assessment, and threat hunting is an ecosystem of cyber capabilities that can communicate freely to improve response time.

Empowering agencies using Elastic as a service inside government

Elastic solutions architects Tristan Ahmadi and Jeremy Woodworth were joined by the Director of Cyber Technologies at ECS, Mike Zakrzewski, to discuss how Elastic Cloud Enterprise (ECE) has impacted the Elastic public sector community and how it can continue to grow to fit ever-evolving mission needs. From threat detection under tightening budgets to networking disparate systems and adopting a risk-based assessment mindset, Elasticsearch has proven to be the foundational element of management and shared service use cases within the federal government. 

Integrating advanced analytics with Elasticsearch

In a solution application deep-dive, two members of Deloitte’s Analytics & Cognitive Applied AI practice detailed how they used Elasticsearch to help a large federal agency expedite document review. Applicable to a wide variety of eDiscovery use cases, this session highlighted the flexible and creative development possible when pairing the Elastic Stack with emerging tech (e.g., ML and NLP) to solve complex government client problems. By focusing on enabling human review as opposed to replacing it, Deloitte built a process that helped find documents more efficiently, learn patterns from user decisions, and be more transparent.

Achieving cyber mission assurance with near real-time impact

Matt Hackman (ECS) walked through how Elastic and ECS support the Mission Assurance Decision Support System (MADSS) program for the Navy. Focusing on observability, data enrichment, and powerful search in a containerized environment, Hackman guided viewers through the development process, arriving at improved productivity and user acceptance in the MADSS. By correlating data from diverse sources using web-based services and secure, automated data transformation services, MADSS improves responsiveness, predictions, and event analysis for critical network and infrastructure outages.

Fireside chat with Nicolas M. Chaillan, Air Force Chief Software Officer (CSO)

In a final session, US Air Force’s Chief Software Officer, Nicolas Chaillan, shared his thoughts with Elastic’s VP of Federal, Steven Coles, on the DoD Data Strategy and the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Initiative (DSOP). From integrating DevSecOps across the services to the importance of having a 360-degree view of data, this fireside chat underscored how the shift to agile and infrastructure as code improve efficiency and provide more robust security across the DoD.

Continue the conversation

Whether you were able to join us live or not, we want to help you keep the learning and community connections alive. We’re always happy to put you in touch with other public sector users to discuss use cases. Email us at federal@elastic.co or join in the Elastic Public Sector Slack workspace, an online forum dedicated to the US public sector community. 

If you'd like to view all videos from the federal event as well as content on the state and local government, education, and international markets, all sessions are now available on demand. These complete sessions give you the benefit of these experts' insights and details on current government challenges and use cases — no matter the mission and no matter the need.