50 Most Influential Government CIOs
June 07, 2011 07:00 AM Check out InformationWeek's Government CIO 50, our power list of top government CIOs--ranging from the NSA's technology chief to innovators at the state and city government level. They've got vision, clout, and sometimes, billion-dollar IT budgets. But most of all, these CIOs are known for delivering tangible, measurable results. Here's an inside look at the government technology leaders and their approaches to unique IT leadership challenges.
Lonny Anderson, CIO and CTO, National Security Agency
Lonny Anderson, CTO and CIO of the secretive National Security Agency, supports the agency's IT-intensive Signals Intelligence mission to gather foreign intelligence from communications, weapons, and radar systems, and he has a hand in NSA's work on the front lines of cybersecurity.
The agency is building three cryptologic centers that will employ more than 1,000 employees at each location, outfitted with new technology, including thin clients, wireless, and virtualized servers. NSA also is heavily invested in cloud computing. It operates a utility cloud analogous to Amazon's EC2, where its applications run; a data cloud powered by MapReduce and Hadoop; and a distributed storage cloud. Anderson is pushing for cloud adoption across the U.S. Intelligence Community.
One of NSA's biggest projects is a $1.2 billion data center that will be operated by Anderson's team and support federal cybersecurity efforts. NSA broke ground on the Utah facility in January.
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