 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS Public Sector Online Summit, which is also virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great interview here remotely. Jennifer Cronus is the general manager with the DOD account for Amazon Web Services. Jennifer, welcome to theCUBE and great to have you over the phone. I know we couldn't get the remote video because location, but I'm glad to have you via your voice. Thanks for joining us. Well, thank you very much, John. Thanks for the opportunity. It's great to be here. Obviously the Department of Defense, big part of the conversation over the past couple of years. One of many examples of the agency's modernizing. And here at the Public Sector Summit virtual online, one of your customers, the Navy, with their ERP is featured. Yes. This really kind of encapsulates kind of this modernization of the public sector. Tell us about what they're doing and their journey. Sure, absolutely. So Navy ERP, which is Navy Enterprise Resource Planning is the department of the Navy's financial system of record. It's built on SAP and it provides financial acquisition and supply management information to Navy commands and Navy leadership, essentially to keep the Navy running and to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the Navy support to the warfighter. It handles about $70 billion in financial transactions each year and has over 72,000 users across six Navy commands and they expect the number of users to double over the next five years. So essentially, this program was in a situation where their on-premises infrastructure was end of life. They were facing an expensive tech upgrade in 2019. They had infrastructure that was hard to scale and prone to system outages. Data analytics were too slow to enable decision-making and users actually referred to it as a fragile system. And so the Navy made the decision last year to migrate the ERP system to AWS Cloud along with SAP NS2, SAP National Security Services. So it's a great use case for a government organization modernizing in the cloud and we're really happy to have them speaking at Summit this year. Now, was this a new move for the Navy? To move to the cloud, a lot of people are end-lifing their data centers, certainly seeing a public sector from education trying to modernize. So was this a new move for them and what kind of information does this affect? I mean, SAP is kind of like, is it like just financial data, is it operational data? What's the move about? Was it new and what kind of data is impacted? Sure, yeah. Well, the Navy actually issued a cloud-first policy in November of 2017. So they've been at it for a while, moving lots of different systems of different sizes and shapes to the cloud. But this migration really marked the first significant enterprise business system for the Navy to move to the cloud. It's actually the largest business system to migrate to the cloud across DOD to date. And so essentially what Navy ERP does is it modernizes and standardizes Navy business operations. So everything think about from timekeeping to ordering missile and radar components for a Navy weapon system. So it's a really comprehensive system. And as I said, the migration to AWS of cloud marks the Navy's largest cloud migration to date. And so this essentially puts the movement and documentation of some $70 billion worth of parts and goods into one accessible space. So the information can be shared, analyzed and protected more uniformly. And what's really exciting about this, and you'll hear from the Navy at Summit, is that they were actually able to complete this migration in just under 10 months, which was nearly half the time it was originally expected to take given its size and complexity. So it's a really, really great story. That's huge numbers. I mean, it used to be years. The old, that's a big day. Yeah, but the old mini computer. I'm old enough to remember like, oh, it's going to be a two year process. 10 months, pretty spectacular. I got to ask, what are some of the benefits that they're seeing in the cloud? Is it, has it changed any roles and responsibilities? What's some of the impact that they're seeing and expecting to see quickly? Yeah, I'd say, you know, there's been a really big impact to the Navy across probably four different areas. One is in decision making, also better customer experience, improved security, and then disaster recovery. So we'll just kind of dive into each of those a little bit. So, you know, moving the system to the cloud has really allowed the Navy to make more timely and informed decisions, as well as to conduct advanced analytics that they weren't able to do as efficiently in the past. So as an example, pulling financial reports and using advanced analytics on their on-prem system used to take them around 20 hours. And now Navy ERP is able to pull these reports in less than four hours, obviously allowing them to run the reports more frequently and more efficiently. And so this has obviously led to an overall better customer experience, enhanced decision making. And they've also been able to deploy their first self-service business intelligence capability. So to put the capability of actually using these advanced analytics in the hands of the actual users. They've also experienced improved security. You know, we talk a lot about the security benefits of migrating to the cloud, but it's given them the opportunity to increase their data protection because now there's only one cloud-based repository of data to protect instead of multiple across a whole host of traditional computing hardware. And then finally they've implemented a real true disaster recovery system by implementing a dual gov cloud strategy by putting data in both our AWS gov cloud East and gov cloud West. They were the first in the Navy to do this to provide them with true disaster recovery. So full gov cloud edge piece. So that brings up the question around, and I love all this tactical edge military kind of DoD thinking. The agility makes total sense. I've been following that for a couple of years now. Is this business side of it, the business operations or is there a tactical edge military component here both or is that next ahead for the Navy? Yeah, you know, I think there will ultimately both. You know, that the Navy's big challenge right now is audit readiness. So what they're focusing on next is migrating all of these financial systems into one general ledger for audit readiness, which has never been done before. I think audit readiness across the DoD has really been problematic. So the next thing that they're focusing on in their journey is not only consolidating to one financial ledger, but also to bring on new users from working capital fund commands across the Navy into this one platform that is secure and stable versus the more fragile system that was previously in place. So we expect over time, once all of the systems migrate that Navy ERP is going to double in size, have more users and the infrastructure is already going to be in place. We are seeing use of all of the tactical edge capabilities in other parts of the Navy, really exciting programs where the Navy is making use of our snowball and snowball edge capabilities. And the Navy ERP did that as well as part of their migration. I saw snow cones out there, a little snow theme there. So the news, Jassy tweeted, you know, it's interesting to see the progression and you mentioned audit readiness. The pattern of cloud is implementing the business model, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and SaaS. And on the business side, you got to get that foundational infrastructure, audit readiness, monitoring, and then the platform and then ultimately the application. So a real indicator that this is happening much faster. So congratulations. But I want to bring that back to now the DOD generally because this is the big surge, infrastructure, platform, SaaS. Other sessions at the public sector summit here on the DOD is the cybersecurity maturity model, which gets into this notion of, okay, baselining it foundation and build on top. What is this all about? The CMMC? And what does it mean? Well, I'll tell you, I think most people know that our US defense industrial base or what we call the Dib has experienced and continues to experience an increasing number of cyber attacks. So every year, the loss of sensitive information and then the election property cost the United States billions each year and really impacts our national security. And there's many examples for weapon systems and sensitive information have been compromised. The F35 Joint Strike Fighter, C17, the MQ9 Reaper, all of these programs have unfortunately experienced some loss of sensitive information. So to address this, the DOD has put in place what they call CMMC, which is the cybersecurity maturity model certification framework. It's a mouthful, which is really designed to ensure that the Dib, the defense industrial base and all of the contractors that are part of the defense supply chain network are protecting federal contract information and controlled unclassified information and that they have the appropriate levels of cybersecurity in place to protect against advanced persistence threats. So in CMMC, there are essentially five levels with various processes and practices in each level. And this is important not only to us as a company, but also to all of our partners and customers because to win new programs, the defense industrial base and supply chain companies will be required to achieve a certain CMMC certification level based on the sensitivity of the program's data. So it's a really important initiative for the DOD and it's really a great way for us to help our partners and customers. Jennifer, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the phone. I really appreciate it. I know there's so much going on the DOD Space Force. Final question real quick for a minute. Take a minute to just share what trends within the DOD you're watching around this modernization. Yeah, well, it has been a really exciting time to be serving our customers in DOD. And I'd say there's a couple of things that we're really excited about. One is the move to tactical edge, which you've talked about and using cloud at the tactical edge. We're really excited about capabilities like the AWS Snowball Edge, which helped Navy ERP migrate to the cloud more quickly. But also, as you mentioned, our AWS Snowcone, which is an even smaller military grade, secure edge computing and data transfer device that weighs just under five pounds and can fit in a standard mailbox or even a small backpack. So it's a really cool capability for our DOD warfighters. Another thing that we're really watching closely is DOD's adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning. So, DOD has really shown that it's pursuing deeper integration of AI and ML into mission-critical and business systems through organizations like the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the J, and the Army AI Task Force to help accelerate the use of cloud-based AI to really improve warfighting capabilities. And then finally, what I'd say we're really excited about is the fact that DOD is starting to build new mission-critical systems in the cloud, born in the cloud, so to speak, systems and capabilities like ABMS in the Air Force, which is the Air Force Advanced Battle Management System, is being constructed and created as a born in the cloud system. So we're really, really excited about those things and think that continued adoption at scale of cloud computing by DOD is going to ensure that our military and our nation maintain our technological advantage and really deliver on mission-critical systems. Jennifer, thanks so much for sharing that insight. Jennifer Crohn, general manager at Amazon Web Services, handling the Department of Defense. Super important transformation efforts going on across the government modernization, certainly the DOD leading the effort. Thank you for your time. This is theCUBE's coverage here. I'm John Furrier, your host for AWS Public Sector Summit Online. It's theCUBE Virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and getting all the content and share that with you. Thank you for watching.