AWS and Deloitte: Building the Data and Cloud Foundation for National Security

Speaker A: Foreign. Hello and

Speaker B: welcome to the CDO Magazine interview series. I'm, um, Aditya Karkera, Chief Data Officer for Deloitte's Government and Public Services. And today I have the privilege of sitting down with someone whose career spans the front lines of national defense and the forefront of cloud innovation. Samantha Fletcher, Head of National Security Programs at Amazon Web Services. Sam, welcome.

Speaker A: Thank you for having me.

Speaker B: Sam, where are you joining us from today?

Speaker A: I am joining you from Herndon, uh, Virginia today, so in the U.S. uh,

Speaker B: on the east coast. Yay. So, um, thank you again for making time. Sam, I'm super excited for our conversation today. I want to start off with a little bit about your career. When you and I were having our prep call, uh, I was genuinely impressed by your career trajectory. And I mean, you were enlisted in the army at what, like 17, 18, something like that. You were deployed into combat environments, you run billion dollar defense programs, and now you lead national security cloud adoption at aws. I mean, gosh, where do we even begin? I guess. I'd love to

Speaker A: hear,

Speaker B: yeah, I'd love to hear from you. What were some of those, um, career defining moments for you in that journey and how that shaped you to who you are today?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great question. Uh, it's been quite a journey. Ah, looking back, I think there's a lot of defining moments, like there is for all of us. I think there's some that were the big monumental moments that really shaped me are kind of my trajectory within my career. Um, the first, like a lot of people from my generation, um, was probably 9, 11. I was just a teenager in Southern California at the time of the attacks. Um, and I remember a lot about that day, as most people do, but I remember calling my mom at her hospital, um, which was on lockdown, and hearing the fear in her voice. Um, and as a young American, even as disconnected as I was in Southern California, I was really trying to wrap my head around what had happened and why. And that day really kind of rearranged my vision for the future and the traditional path, you know, that I was expected to take for, for college, get a job, start a family, have stability. Um, and instead it all went up in smoke. Um, and I joined the army, um, really driven by probably a somewhat naive, um, but also really fierce belief that, that I could make a difference in the world. Um, so that was definitely one of those, those big moments. Um, another was probably my first deployment. Um, I got to my first duty station, which was in Wiesband, Germany, just after completing basic Training and ait and we almost immediately deployed to Iraq. Um, I was very young. I was very far from home, um, and all of a sudden I was responsible for intelligence work, um, where the stakes were truly life or death. And, um, I learned so much, um, in that time. But, you know, in combat, rank and titles, they tend to really dis. Solve, um, and what endures is that competence and that trust. And that was a foundational lesson for me. I learned that success was never individual, um, it was a collective, it was a team. Um, and it's really done by teams that are bonded together by the mission, by shared sacrifice, accountability, and shared success. And I learned that the stronger the team, the greater the impact and the outcome could be. Um, and it was also in this time frame where I found my own talent and passion, um, for hunting bad guys, um, and that really would shape, um, and consume the better part of the next decade of my life. Um, other big moments. Life happens to everybody. I definitely had some moments where life happened to me. So I think another big moment or lesson or pivot point, um, was really probably a combination of severe injury during my time in the army, um, and also a breast cancer diagnosis a couple years ago. And both these moments really kind of changed my perspective or recalibrated my perspective on fragility and gratitude. And I learned in a really hard way, um, and then subsequently reminded, um, of my own great strengths and specifically resilience. So I think, like most people, every chapter, um, you know, makes. It makes its impact. And I think for me, you know, deployment certainly in Iraq and Afghanistan, um, working across the Middle east and Africa building counter drone systems, you know, leading large business units. All the things that you mentioned, they all really reinforce the same core lessons for me, um, especially about leadership. Right. And leadership isn't about authority, it's about service. It's about listening and empowering others, uh, leading by example and standing firm when everything is uncertain. And I think those, those principles, you know, were gained in those hard times, but those principles still carry me every day. Um, whether I'm in a boardroom or in a meeting with mission partners, they're still kind of my guiding light.

Speaker B: Wow. Um, Sam, thank you for sharing that with the audience. I mean, what really strikes me with your background is, you know, whether it was your journey when you were at 19 or whether you kind of standing up these, uh, defense programs at multiple agencies. I mean, the common thread definitely is that all of this is focused on mission for you. And, uh, your story of resilience is really inspiring. Um, semis as we move on. Um, today as head of national security programs for uh, AWS today you are working across agencies, uh, at almost every classification level. Uh, what problems are you most focused on solving right now? Um, I guess, you know, what does success look like today in your current role?

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot of things that we're focused on right now. Um, it is interesting times, it is trying times. Um, sometimes of the things we're most focused on right now is speed to capability. Um, our national security customers, they're operating in environments um, where our threats are evolving much faster than the traditional acquisition timelines really allow us to move at. And so the need for cutting edge technology, AI analytics, compute, um, it can't wait 18 to 24 months on that acquisition timeline. And so it's my job and it's my team's job to help compress that timeline and enable um, tech to reach the mission end users much, much faster. Uh, we're spending a lot of time focused on data as a strategic asset. Um, right. The agencies have enormous volumes of data. We've got SIGINT data, Emmett humint, all kinds of data. Uh, but a lot of it still remains really siloed and therefore it's underutilized. And so we spent a lot of time focused on helping them build the data foundations, um, that make AI and other tooling um, actually work, um, but also make all of that data so much more powerful and useful, make it discoverable, have it governed, um, and most importantly having interoperable data that can be used across all the domains is huge um, for us right now. And um, I think especially with government, we spend a lot of time right now talking about focusing energy on the workforce readiness. Um, technology alone can't transform national security and it can't transform organizations. The people do that. So we're investing really heavily in helping our customers build cloud fluent AI ready teams, um, who can operate the capabilities that we're bringing to bear but also do it at mission speed, um, to success. I um, know that looks different in every era. Uh, but um, I think success for me is kind of simple right now. Um, did we make mission faster? Did we make it smarter? Did we make it more resilient? And did we help drive impact and mission outcomes? Did we lighten the load, you know, for, for an operator? Did we lighten a cognitive load? Did we help an analyst, um, connect diverse intelligence sources to identify a threat? Um, those to me are real measures and they're tangible success outcomes. Um, and they all lead to the end goal, right? Not just doing technology for technology's sake, but technology that delivers impact and outcomes.

Speaker B: Yeah, Sam, I couldn't agree more. I mean, technology is moving at such a fast pace, but it all comes down to the foundation. So I really appreciate your comments on the foundations around data as well as kind of bringing your workforce along because, uh, it's almost always seems, at least in my 26 years serving the public sector directly and indirectly, like, you know, technology is not the problem. It just seems that most of the bottlenecks are around the organizational and the governance infrastructure. And of course the workforce piece is super important because I feel like you can throw in all the technology, all the processes, and if you're not bringing your people along to your point, that's what we've already call it, a success. Uh, Sam, Late last year, AWS announced plans to invest almost 50 billion to add nearly 1.3 gigawatts of AI and supercomputing capacity. And I believe it was specifically around AWS top secret, AWS secret and govcloud regions. You know, that's quite an incredible commitment, you know. What does it mean in practice for the agencies and missions you support?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, I mean it's not a small investment, it's huge. Um, it's the largest investment to date. But we've been making massive investments in this space for well over a decade. And this is truly, I mean this is a generational investment. Right. Um, and I think we should be really clear about what it unlocks, um, because the scale really can't be overstated. Um, it's going to, for the first time, allow agencies, um, you know, intelligence and defense agencies to have access not just to AI and high performance computing, but to purpose built AI, um, and high performance computing infrastructure. It's designed specifically for their environments. Right. And for their mission needs. Um, so a lot of our agencies today, they're constrained, um, they can't run large scale models or AI workloads. Um, they need the compute that just isn't there to do the larger training. Um, and of course for them their data is in specific environments. So we have to bring those environments to where the data lives. And that means at every classification level. So this investment, um, as well as the investments we've been making for over a decade, they really change that equation. So it means that the agencies can train and fine tune their own models on their data. Not generic commercial data, but mission relevant data. So it means you can run real time analytics at scale across multiple domains. Um, it means super computing workloads that previously required dedicated on prem clusters can now be run elastically in secure environments. So practically, it really translates to faster intelligence cycles, more sophisticated AI enabled decision support, and, um, the ability to do in hours what used to take days or weeks.

Speaker B: Well, Sam, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for your time and for your candor today. I know the audience is going to be super excited to listen to all of the great insights you share today.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And for our audiences, please continue to watch out for more interviews coming out from our government leaders in this series. Thank you.