On July 15, Vienna, VA-based VAST Federal, a VAST Data subsidiary that helps government agencies modernize their data centric operations with mission-ready storage solutions, announced former CIA Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Gus Hunt has joined as its newest board member. In this role, Hunt will rely on his years of experience in the public sector to advise the company on its continued federal expansion. VAST Federal helps the US federal government and defense organizations unlock the full potential of their data by providing them with the industry’s only cloud storage platform that combines the speed of an all-flash system with the affordability of an archive to quickly analyze and respond to national security situations in real-time.
Hunt served as CTO at the CIA from 2008 until 2013, a role that followed his previous stint as Director of Applications Services for the agency. While there, he set the information technology strategic direction and future technology investment plan for the CIA. Hunt now serves as CEO of private consulting practice Hunt Technologies.
“The addition of Gus to the VAST Federal board bolsters our efforts in providing the public sector with a unified solution that delivers Storage as a Service for data-driven intelligence,” said Randy Hayes, vice president of VAST Federal. “Gus understands the key inflection points for the opportunity within the federal government and we look forward to him bringing this deep-rooted knowledge and forward-thinking expertise into the VAST universe.”
“The reality is that the federal government lives in a multi-cloud world – on-prem solutions coupled with multiple off-prem solutions – and the sophisticated algorithms that VAST has designed into its all-flash cloud solution allow it to uniquely serve as the bedrock of analytics and AI for today’s data-driven agencies,” said Hunt. “As the federal landscape only becomes more complex, there is a growing need for solutions that cost-effectively provide a rich mix of performance, scale, capacity, and intelligence and VAST’s Universal Storage platform provides a superior approach to managing and extracting value from vast reserves of information.”
The federal government collects and monitors large amounts of data across a myriad of sectors from defense and cybersecurity to aerospace and social services. Federal IT leaders are looking to streamline their data-centric operations to quickly analyze data to identify suspicious activity, enhance mission-critical capabilities or enable research breakthroughs, without overburdening the budget. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) are transforming the way government agencies draw insights from data to better understand potential threats and respond to new demands or unexpected emergencies. VAST offers technological innovations that improve overall infrastructure performance for AI and HPC environments in addition to making the system much more cost-effective compared to legacy systems and even other all-flash systems.
Source: VAST Federal
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