In December 2017, QTS Realty Trust named me to its Federal Advisory Board. There were five of us, each brought in for a different slice of federal technology experience.
QTS operated large data center and hybrid cloud infrastructure, including facilities serving federal customers. The board existed to pressure test how that infrastructure fit what agencies were actually being asked to do.
The work
What the board was for
Agencies were in the middle of a long, awkward migration. Data center consolidation mandates, FedRAMP, hybrid cloud, and security requirements were all moving at once, and often in different directions.
My contribution was mostly architectural and security oriented: how workloads should be placed, what compliance obligations actually require versus what people assume they require, and where hybrid designs quietly create new risk.
It was the same question as MAX, at a different layer of the stack. Where do you put the boundary, and who is accountable on each side of it?