NetApp INSIGHT 2024 | Michelle Rudnicki, NetApp

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Michelle Rudnicki

President, U.S. Public Sector Inc.

NetApp

NetApp pioneers IT modernization for federal agencies through intelligent data infrastructure and cost-saving solutions

To improve service delivery and enhance data management and analytics, technological advancements are needed to modernize archaic systems in the public sector, making room for an intelligent data infrastructure.NetApp Inc. has set the ball rolling for federal agencies to modernize their IT operations by leveraging cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence, to boost mission-critical capabilities, improve decision-making and bolstering cybersecurity with zero-trust architectures, according to Michelle Rudnicki (pictured), president of the U.S. public sector at NetApp

play_circle_outline Federal agencies using NetApp for data infrastructure and decision-making efficiency

play_circle_outline Boosting Efficiency: AI, Cybersecurity, and Cost Management in Public Sector IT Solutions with NetApp

play_circle_outline Simplifying data management through unified storage and AI readiness

play_circle_outline Role of partners in bridging gaps and providing comprehensive solutions for government projects

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Michelle Rudnicki, NetApp

Michelle Rudnicki

President, U.S. Public Sector Inc. NetApp

NetApp is helping federal agencies streamline operations by providing intelligent data infrastructure that crosses silos, allowing for better decisions and efficiency. AI is playing a bigger role in decision-making within the public sector, but fragmented data is a challenge. NetApp's focus on security and certifications, like NSA's CSfC, help protect sensitive data. The company also helps clients manage costs through solutions like Keystone. Partners play a crucial role in providing comprehensive solutions to public sector clients. The government's efforts t... Read more

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What are some ways federal agencies are using NetApp to streamline operations and improve decision-making efficiency within the government? add

What are some ways NetApp is supporting its public sector clients in managing costs and modernizing their systems? add

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Rebecca Knight

>> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2024. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst, Rob Strechay. Rob, it's an election here in the U.S. I'm not going to talk about the election, but we're going to talk about the public sector.

>> Absolutely. And I think it's also an interesting time because it's the end of the year for the public sector as well for the federal at least. So this is perfect timing to have somebody on to really dive into what does all of this stuff we're talking about mean for public sector.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed, indeed. Well, I'd like to welcome back to theCUBE, Michelle Rudnicki, president U.S. public sector at NetApp.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Thank you and thank you for having me back.

Rebecca Knight

>> Excellent. Well, let's get started. Why don't you start in broad brush terms and provide an overview for our viewers of how federal agencies are using NetApp to really streamline their operations in order to make better decisions, quicker decisions, and bring more efficiency to the very large, sometimes slow-moving government.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> They are all very large organizations and so what we've seen with our federal government, much like a lot of our customers, is that they've had to take advantage of cloud and other things so that their infrastructures are becoming more and more diverse. That means they've got data here, data there, and where NetApp has been able to help them is to really cross those silos and bring intelligent data infrastructure that they can take advantage of, whether they're in the cloud or they're working on-prem. So we see a lot of that.

>> Yeah, I mean I think we heard yesterday, and I think it was George who said it, that some of the more regulated industries are really embracing really AI. Maybe they've been sort left behind in some of their digital transformation, they couldn't get there, but AI seems to be playing a bigger role and AI doesn't live without data. So how are you seeing AI and the decision-making and driving that decision-making inside the public sector?

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Yeah, so of course our government officials and our government agencies all want to make the best possible decisions for their citizens and our public. And so they're looking at how do we utilize AI? And when we're talking to a lot of the agencies, one of the biggest struggles they have is we've got data, but it's a little fragmented. And in order for us to make the best decisions, we have to be able to get that data together to be able to take advantage of it all to make the right decisions to take advantage of AI. So we really see them. They're a little bit nascent on it, but we've seen some organizations move forward like Yale University, I know that's in the other part, that's not one of my government customers, but one of our public sector customers that is using it to help to look at the research and move forward with our clinicians on the medical center. So they're reading the notes and being able to get better insights out of the data that they have.

Rebecca Knight

>> How do you describe the state of innovation within the public sector? There's a new project out of Stanford University called the Digitalist Papers. There's a story about it in the New York Times, Erik Brynjolfsson, a very famous researcher, and he's trying to highlight the need for institutional innovation, particularly for the government to increase the odds that AI enhances democracy and wipes out misinformation or disinformation. Maybe not completely eliminate it, but how do you view?

Michelle Rudnicki

>> And so I think there's a lot of truth in that and talking to some of our customers that are here, actually we were talking with a DoD customer and they're like, they were listening to the same conversation from George yesterday and they're like, "Yeah, we're just so far back that being able to take advantage of some of these technologies, maybe we can leapfrog and really get ahead of things." Sometimes when you're deprived, it's like, let's just take the leap and NetApp can help us to do that, right? By giving us complete solutions, not us having to take all the pieces and integrate it together ourselves.

>> And I think cybersecurity and cyber resilience and really even compartmentalization and all of those degrees and signing up to be secure from the start, which is part of the NIST and some of the DoD and some of the... That has to help when you're going in to have these conversations and they have to be looking for that stuff.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Absolutely. I think NetApp's been a trusted partner of the federal government for over 30 years, and some of the reasons that they've trusted us is we always have kept security in the forefront. I think last year or last spring when I was talking to you, we were talking to, we just joined CISA Secure by Design. Some of the other things we've done over the years is we always are testing for government standards and others, whether it's common criteria for DoD or ISO standards, which apply to not only our government but governments around the world. And then one of the other things we did was the NSA's CSfC certification, which is the Commercial Solutions for Classified Environments where they tested our products to say it's good enough to hold secret and top secret data, so we'll make this available for commercial companies or for other agencies so that they don't have to redo all of the testing.

Rebecca Knight

>> So IT budgets are tight. That's true in the private sector, but it's especially true in the public sector. And modernizing legacy systems is expensive, it takes a long time, and there are lots of procurement hurdles as well. So how is NetApp supporting its public sector clients and helping them manage these costs while also still pushing forward and doing the modernization efforts that are so badly needed

Michelle Rudnicki

>> In a couple of different ways. In some ways, we're helping them with the design of their solution. So we see a number of our customers struggling with, there's been an increase in costs with their VMware by Broadcom licensing. So helping them to re-architect and utilize more efficient solutions so that they can reduce the cost of those bills. In fact, we helped one customer save over a million dollars by just using NetApp in places where they were using some other products, and it helped to reduce their overall bill tremendously. The other area that we see is in use of consumption based offerings, our Keystone offering is really getting traction with our federal customers because it allows them to go into an OpEx and to pay for what they want and what they need. So they're getting modern equipment when they need it on demand without having to have those capital purchases and those big spikes in their budgets.

>> And it would seem that even though the requirements of the federal government and like DoD and the three-letter acronym, spooky guys over there in the corner are pretty extreme, it helps everybody across that because like you said, Yale still doesn't want their patient data getting out and securing it and things of that nature. How do you see everything that you do with all of this works for not only federal, but SLED as well as you would call it? .

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Oh, yeah. And oftentimes I talked a little bit about that CSfC certification, and when we first publicized that we had gotten this certification, all of the calls that I got were actually from commercial where it was banks and other things, healthcare organizations that are like, "Tell me a little bit more about this. What does this mean to me? What did they test for?" So having that embedded security. And then the other things that actually becomes more prominent in SLED and in some companies is ransomware. Ransomware is, although there are more than enough cyber threats on the federal side, ransomware, you see a little bit more prominent on some of the other side. So the inherent capabilities that we have to automatically detect anomalies in utilization help prevent those attacks.

>> I mean, I always joked about it, but when you think of some place like educational institutions like MIT where they're teaching people cybersecurity, they have more hackers inside their own four walls, and they have to be very secure. And that must be a consideration for that, especially in that part of the public sector is, "Hey, we're not the NSA and we're not air gapped or these different regions, but we have to be able... The data has to be accessible, but yet at the same time, we have to figure out how to bring AI to it and things of that nature."

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Have it protected and have it protected and available, and let's hope we have white hats than a black hats.

>> Yes, yeah. Well, hopefully.

Rebecca Knight

>> So let's talk about today's product announcements and the kinds of advancements that you see is really meeting the public sector's need for reliable and robust data management systems.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Yup. So I think a couple of things, like some of our new announcements from an ASA standpoint is really helping customers who have those big block environments have a product that is designed and optimized, cost optimized just for them. I think we're going to get tremendous traction with that. Also, it's AI ready. And so I think having solutions not just, "Hey, I've got storage for you," but really I've got an infrastructure, I've got a toolkit that I can have that can help you to get up and running with AI faster or things that are definitely of high interest to all of our customers.

>> And I would think that, again, the simplicity aspect, and I always go back to this with NetApp, just having been here over a decade ago, and it was always about simplicity from the beginning. And we actually talked to Jeff Baxter about the six S's, and that was one of them as well. I don't want to say it's my favorite out of the six. Sustainability's good as well. But when you talk about somebody, because again, to what Rebecca was saying about budgets and things like that, they can't hire always. They're not paying what a bank is paying for their IT talent. How do you see NetApp and the solutions you're bringing, like you said, they're skipping and doing AI and stuff like that, and how do you see that and how do the partners play a role in that as well?

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Yeah, so from a simplicity standpoint, the simplest answer I can give you, one of the things is NetApp has always been good at unified storage. And so being able to have the same set of tools, whether I'm working on files or block or object, I can have a single system administrator. And now we extend that not only to the on-prem environment, but into the cloud. You've got the same APIs, you've got the same things. That drives simplicity across all of my environments. And as I said, with some of the AI things we're bringing, it's like now you're not having to do every element of it, but bringing that together with some of the observability and some of the other tooling that we're putting on top of that, again, just helps to simplify even more.

Rebecca Knight

>> How do you see the skills gap in the public sector right now? Because it is an enduring trend in the technology industry, and as Rob astutely pointed out, you're not going to make as much money if you're a technologist if you go into the public sector versus as you say, the bank or a big tech company. So what is the selling point? I mean, is it that Gen Z is more attracted to mission-driven, purpose-driven roles? I mean, how do you see the public sector as being a competitive place to work for this kind of work?

Michelle Rudnicki

>> So I think public sector, it's always been hard for our government executives to hire people in and attract that talent. I think there are some really interesting things. People go there because they enjoy the mission or a program. When I look at the government, I think it's got some of the most advanced technology, and then it's got some of the most remote, the most lagging.

Rebecca Knight

>> Archaic.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> That's the best word.

Rebecca Knight

>> We'll say it. You don't have to.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> There you go. And so I think in the areas that are really interesting, people will go for the interest. For the rest, I think the government has tried really hard to adopt post-pandemic, really the remote work and being able to give people the flexibility and the lifestyle that they want and the government benefits. It might not be paid, but in the long run there's a work-life balance and some other things. So they're also trying some new programs where they're offering some pay bump for certain skills. So there are a number of things that the government is doing because they know they have to really focus in on attracting talent. And AI jobs are one of those. They've called out every AI role and they've provided a number of incentives that hiring managers can do.

>> And I think when you talk about the skills gap, there's a lot of partners that you work with in that space as well. I would assume that help you, they're cleared and all this other stuff on the federal side.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Absolutely. We have a good number of partners that have been with us in the federal space, and we continue to enhance the partner community that we have. But the partners play a big role. And look, we're NetApp, we bring storage, storage, management, but we can't necessarily bring everything that a client needs. And what we find is a lot of our government purchasers really are buying solutions. They need their switches, they need their servers, they need everything at once because they're going to go forward and put a solution or a program in place that's going to meet a mission need, which takes a lot of components and it takes those services. So yes, our channel partners as well as the systems integrators really help us to bridge that gap.

Rebecca Knight

>> How different are your public sector clients from your private sector clients? For lack of a better words, in the sense of is there learnings that can take place of here's what we're doing, or is it just so vastly different when you're dealing with the government?

Michelle Rudnicki

>> So in a lot of ways they're not that different. When you get down to the technology, the technology is technology. It's just supporting one mission versus a business. But where we see differences, it's just how they buy is a little bit different. The regulations around that are a little bit different, and some of that's what causes the bureaucracy or the slowness. Because here we are, once again, we are not going to have a budget when we hit October 1st. It will be maybe December and maybe some months after that. So it really requires, if I go back, a lot of it is around that acquisition and as you said, having partners that know how to work with our customers and help them to bridge those gaps with their buying vehicles and with different ways that we can help the government to make it through those challenging times.

Rebecca Knight

>> Indeed, they are challenging. Michelle, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

Michelle Rudnicki

>> Thank you for having me again.

Rebecca Knight

>> A real interesting conversation. I'm Rebecca Knight for Rob Strechay. Stay tuned for more of our live coverage of NetApp Insight 2024. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.