Government has plenty of data that can be used to advance the mission and improve customer experience, cybersecurity and system performance, especially when combined with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
The problem is that it lives in many different environments. “It’s on prem, it’s off prem, it’s multicloud, it’s structured, it’s unstructured,” said Chris Townsend, Vice President for Public Sector at Elastic, which helps agencies find the answers they need from data in real time and at scale. It’s often impractical to bring it all together into a single data lake.
One alternative is to leave that data in place, but to index it using a common platform that makes it accessible and findable. This decentralized architecture — referred to as a data mesh — makes it possible to handle growing volumes of data without running into performance problems.
AI and ML can enhance multiple use cases that have data as a foundation, from search to application performance monitoring, making that dispersed government data both more accessible and safer.
“Machine learning features analyze your data and generate models for its patterns of behavior. The type of analysis that you choose depends on the questions or problems you want to address and the type of data you have available,” Townsend said.
Using ML, security teams can automate detection and analysis of system anomalies, allowing faster repair. And capabilities like vector search — which uses ML to capture meaning and context in unstructured data — and natural language processing (NLP) make data more productive by producing better and more comprehensive search results.
With a common platform, an agency can apply these tools to all its data from a centralized dashboard. For example, the Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program uses Elastic’s Cross Cluster Search to monitor the data of civilian agencies wherever that data resides. That allows CDM to deploy the AI/ML model to find threats across all the agencies they’re protecting. And, it will learn to recognize problems from any one agency if they show up in another.
Applying AI and ML to an agency’s dispersed data also brings better and faster search results. The traditional setup may leave data analysts jumping from one system to another to gather what they need. “Many of the systems we have today are very cumbersome,” Townsend said.
Elastic’s AI-powered Elasticsearch platform offers sophisticated indexing so data can be accessed quickly and efficiently, with accurate results — even if it’s years old. Analysts don’t have to predict how they may want to use their data over time. “Our platform indexes all the possibilities upfront, so we allow you to ask any questions to the data for years into the future,” Townsend said. “The challenge for government is how to access all that information to better execute their mission, improve cybersecurity and improve customer experience,” he said. “Elastic has the flexibility and scale to allow them to do that.”
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