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Welcome to The Bottom Line Up Front, the
podcast that cuts through the noise to
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deliver distilled insights from today's
most important technical webinars,
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presentations, and demonstrations.
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Designed for federal and military
IT leaders, each episode breaks down
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complex technologies into mission-ready
takeaways so you get the key points fast.
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Whether it's cybersecurity, cloud
architecture, or emerging defense
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technologies, we highlight what matters
most and how trusted integrators
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like ATPGov can help implement
and operationalize these solutions
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across your agency or command.
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No fluff, no filler, just
the bottom line up front.
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Today's episode is all about AI
systems that actually work in
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federal environments, not just
lab demos or commercial hype.
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We're breaking down a deep technical
session with vast data looking at
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how modern AI workloads are reshaping
the data stack from storage to
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databases to real-time AI pipelines,
and what that means for DoD, IC, and
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civilian agencies that care about
security, scale, and automation.
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First, we have to talk about the problem
that the government is actually facing.
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If you had asked us in 2023, I would
say majority of our opportunities were
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based around this concept of universal
storage and being able to collapse
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tiers of data within a data center.
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Today, that has pivoted
tremendously towards the AI side.
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Federal agencies are no longer
struggling with, quote, "how much
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storage," but how fast, how current,
and how actionable their data really is.
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And that's because AI has
shifted from batch model training
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to real-time inference and
retrieval, also known as RAG.
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And the government use cases now demand
near real-time ingestion, continuous
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updates on knowledge bases, and
thousands of concurrent AI agents.
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But as we move into utilizing those kinds
of, hesitate to say applications, but the
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AI implementations, you know, it really
changes that it's not batch oriented.
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It's gotta be real time.
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As things get updated, you know,
these RAG pipelines and so forth that
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we'll talk a little about, have to
be very, very current, meaning within
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seconds of, you know, new documents
being added to a realm, being able
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to utilize those in these workflows.
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Very different requirements as
we move into this inference era.
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Maybe tens of thousands of agents will
be accessing this stuff, and it really
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changes the whole dynamic of what's
required for computing, and that's really
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what we are bringing to the forefront.
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Existing legacy architectures weren't
designed for streaming inference
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pipelines, multi-tenant AI workloads,
or zero trust data access at scale.
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And this is where a lot
of agencies get stuck.
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They don't fail on GPUs or models,
they fail on data movement,
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latency, and security boundaries.
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It's a very different conversation than
what capacity needs do you have or what
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fees and feeds and those kind of things.
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So we're really getting away from that
quite a bit, especially talking about
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the AI workflows as everyone's trying
to figure out how to do that, um, and
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we can help to simplify a lot of those.
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So I want to touch on the DAY's
architecture in case you're,
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uh, not familiar with this.
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As I said, it's, it's
a unique architecture.
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It's very different.
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Some of the limitations that even a
scale-out architecture built on HA
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pairs has were kind of glaring and,
and that's where the VAST system
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filled all of those gaps, if you will.
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This architecture is very different
in the, in the obvious part of being
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shared everything, and what that
really means is that if you think of
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a controller-based implementation,
controllers manage disks, right?
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Or, or Flash in, in our case.
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Um, and so we don't actually
have that same relationship.
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So what does disaggregated and
share everything actually mean?
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VAST DAY's architecture
fundamentally changes how
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performance and scale are delivered.
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In plain technical terms, that means
C nodes handle protocols and compute,
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those being NFS, S3, SMB, Kafka,
NVMe, and TCP, while D nodes store
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state and data with no controller
ownership and no HA pair bottlenecks.
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This also includes NVMe over Fabrics
connecting everything at low latency.
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And storage class memory absorbs
write pressures, and QLC flash is used
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efficiently and gently for long-term data.
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Having an understanding of storage and
integration experience really matters in
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this conversation because mapping mission
workloads to performance profiles while
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avoiding over-provisioning is an extremely
important part of this implementation.
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You do have to consider independent
scale of performance versus capacity,
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simpler life scale management, and
fewer architectural choke points
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from long-term mission systems.
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But, uh, we're all kind of in it together
and, and kind of creating this whole
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vision for kind of simplifying AI.
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And just from a little history,
the company was started in 2016.
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Um, the whole idea was this
revolutionary new architecture
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for storage and for storing data.
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Um, it was really all about
the data, which is why we're
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Vast Data and not Vast Storage.
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Um, storage is a thing, but
managing the data and making data
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useful is what we're all about.
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The idea behind Vast was to
create this new architecture.
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We call it DASE, the Disaggregated
And Shared Everything.
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And that was, you know, kind of
counterintuitive to every other
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storage company, um, because they
were all about shared nothing
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implementations and still are today.
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While talking to Vast, we also saw
a shift from the, quote, "storage
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platform to the AI operating system."
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Because Vast has said that they're
not trying to win on storage anymore.
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It's all about collapsing multiple
AI infrastructure layers into
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a single operational platform.
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And their latest platform expansion
includes unified data stores at the file
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object and structured data levels, SQL
and vector databasing to allow for massive
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scale, Kafka native data streams, and
data engines that leverage functions,
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triggers, and event-driven automation,
while agent engines and insight
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engines use NVIDIA NIMs, GPU-assisted
embeddings, and inference workflows.
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So what that means for your environment
is it eliminates brittle multi-vendor
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pipelines, reduces security accreditation
scope, and enables real-time AI reactions
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to data retrieval And most importantly,
between all of these Sync Engine, Insight
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Engine, Agent Engine, having the same
security, so having them in this, you
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know, single data platform allows us to
manage who can use what agents, which
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users can go out and do inferencing or,
uh, embeddings and things like that,
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and make sure that those, uh, Insight
Engines and Agent Engine components
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can get access only to data that the
user is allowed to have access to.
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And so that's one of the
clear differentiators.
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But I also want to highlight some
non-hypothetical use cases that
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we discussed with VAST and the
expansion of its new platform.
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Those include cyber network security.
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The new VAST platform includes AFRL packet
capture and NetFlows, instant pivot from
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metadata to full packet, reduced Splunk
licensing footprints, and faster zero-day
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investigations Secondly, we talked
about citizen and analyst AI assistants.
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We discuss a recent IRS chatbot example
and continuous documentation updates.
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Thirdly, we discuss multi-tenant
agencies and how the VAST platform is a
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shared platform with logical isolation,
cost amortization, and role-based
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and attribute-based boundaries.
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In this example, I'm gonna use
some S3 buckets, and I have set
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up some triggers so that something
gets dropped into the S3 bucket.
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I can see that as a trigger, and this is
where we use our Kafka engine internally
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to impact that and, and, and basically
execute a function based on that.
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Um, with the Insight engine,
function could be to call out
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to a, a, a GPU and do, you know,
vector embeddings or other things.
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So the idea is that within the
VAST Data platform itself, we
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can now create triggers and
functions, minimal coding required.
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Uh, most of this stuff is
written in Python, but could be
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written pretty much in anything.
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All we need to do is take that code and
put a Docker wrapper around it, and now
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we have a Docker container that we can
execute as a trigger or, or, or function.
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Once you create those elements, then you
can actually go in and create pipelines.
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And that leads us into a
conversation about zero trust,
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ABAC, and security realities.
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This particular part of the
discussion emphasizes where AI
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platforms fail in government today
when security is bolted on later.
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And this is why VAST's new architecture
bakes it in from the beginning, because
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it includes native RBAC and ABAC, active
directory integrations, metadata-driven
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access controls, zero trust principles
embedded at the data layer with the same
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policies distributed across AI agents,
databases, object storage, and pipelines.
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As far as the data store and the database,
that's kind of where stuff's stored.
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I didn't talk too much about the
data space, but that gives us the
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ability to have this global namespace.
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So I have maybe something in Amazon,
something in Azure, something on-prem.
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Um, we can share data across those
different realms, have that as a single
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global namespace and, and again, manage
the security across that, move data
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only when necessary, give access to
data across wide area networks, so.
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We actually handle, uh, about 99% of the
zero trust without any external softwares.
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It's all built into the VAST
system, so there's a lot of
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security components built in.
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But ABAC is, uh, is a core component
of, of our security infrastructure and
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how we manage that and allow capturing
of, of lots of different metadata
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and giving it specific attributes
based on, uh, on need there, so.
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In our view, this is where VAST really
adds value in validating these controls
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against RMF, DoD zero trust scores,
and agency-specific security overlays.
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So in the end, the AI accelerates
approvals instead of blocking them.
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So what's the bottom line up front
of VAST's new AI operating system?
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It's all about data architecture,
security, and operational simplicity.
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Because federal AI isn't about flashy
models, and platforms like VAST
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show what's possible when storage,
databases, streaming, and AI pipelines
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are treated as one system instead
of six It means that AI success in
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government is a data problem first.
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Daze architectures remove scale
and performance bottlenecks,
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unified platforms reduce complexity
and accreditation friction, and
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real-time AI requires event-driven
data pipelines, while ABAC and zero
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trust must exist at the data layer.
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And in the end, success in this arena
still depends on integrators, integrators
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who understand federal networks,
zero trust, and mission constraints
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well enough to put this tech to work.
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So if you're exploring AI platforms,
data modernization, or zero trust
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alignment and want to understand what
actually works in your environment, reach
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out so we can help translate fast new
architecture into real mission outcomes.
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Be sure to reach out to ATPGov today at
www.atpgov.com or email info@atpgov.com or
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check us out on social media on LinkedIn.
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Thanks for listening, and be sure to
subscribe to the Bottom Line Up Front
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wherever you get your podcasts, and stay
tuned for more distilled insights from the
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front lines of tech and national security.
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So until next time, stay
secure, stay mission ready.