November 16, 2023
Today, we have Will Laforest from Confluent explain how federal leaders can harness the power of data streaming.
We all know that data has exploded since the advent of cheap storage, remote computing, and the proliferation of the Internet of Things. Several lessons have been learned. First, just because you have petabytes of data doesn’t mean it can help in making decisions; second, if you delay acting on that data you can leave your agency vulnerable.
The Federal Data Strategy recognizes these concepts. It talks about innovative ways to create, share, and consume data.
In this interview, Will LaForest unpacks the idea of getting insights on perishable data. His company, Confluent, was founded in 2014 by engineers who leveraged an open-source project called Kafka to enable systems to absorb data in real-time.
"the whole points of data in motion of Kafka is to essentially decouple data producers from people who want the data and enable them to receive that data in real time. "
During the interview, Will provides guidelines on understanding concepts like low coupling, microservices, and data meshes.
The foundational concept is to allow federal agencies to ingest data rapidly and be able to take advantage of the plethora of information to assist in making decisions that need to be made rapidly.
The best example that Will LaForest gives is threat intelligence. When a malicious event occurs, time is of the essence. Rapid response can mitigate any damage that is done by many cybersecurity events.
If you enjoyed this article, you may want to listen to Ep. 102 Cyber update: Federal Legislation and Current Cyber Threats
John Gilroy
John Gilroy appeared on National Public Radio in Washington DC for 25 years. He wrote 523 technology columns for The Washington Post. Currently, John is an award-winning lecturer at Georgetown University. Forgot to mention — he has recorded over 1,000 podcast interviews.
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