By Dick Stark

Last week, RightStar exhibited at the Atlassian Government Symposium, held at the JW Marriott in Washington, DC. This is one of a series of worldwide stops to promote Atlassian products, services and customer networking. Atlassian had a good turnout with more than 400 attendees.  We participted with Raytheon in a well attended session describing their DOD Success story. Here is a short summary of the Symposium.

Atlassian Government Update. Steve Elliott, head of product for Jira Align, opened the session with a short Atlassian update. According to Steve, Atlassian has 83% of the F500 and is in more than 1000 government agencies. And, the total worldwide customer count now stands at more than 150,000. Steve discussed the progress made with modernization and digital transformation projects using the Atlassian toolsets and highlighted two success stories—GSA and Sacramento County, California.

At GSA it is Jira, Confluence, and Trello that have made “hyper” collaboration possible, and the good news—Trello is currently going through the FedRAMP process with full certification expected later this year, and with Jira and Confluence to soon follow. Additionally, Sacramento County is using Jira Service Desk, Confluence, and Jira to scale ITSM and delivers seamless agile services and projects. The result is an improvement in efficiency, balanced workloads, and a freeing up of time and money to focus on the projects that matter most.

DevSecOps in the Air Force. Nicolas Chaillan, Chief Software Officer, USAF was up next as the keynote speaker. He described the journey to transform the modern Air Force into a software development powerhouse and the example he has set for the rest of the Department of Defense. What make the Air Force so special?

• Containerization,
• The DOD Centralized Artifact Repository (DCAR),
• Baked in zero trust security,
• Cloud and DevSec-Ops as managed services,
• Standardized metrics,
• Massive scale learning, and
• Microservices architecture.

Nicolas concluded by highlighting some of the benefits of his Agile approach: consistent deployments, baked in security, auditability and compliance, everything as code, and declarative manifests and playbooks.

Atlassian Help Desk Replacement. Raytheon and RightStar rounded out the morning. We described the work involved to move a DOD agency off a legacy service desk to Jira Service Desk. The project was completed on-time and because the agency uses the DI2E hosted environment, there is no software cost. The JSD system provided far more functionality than the previous legacy system. We even wrote a script to archive all 88,000 old tickets and attachments into a read only Insight object schema. Other benefits included: extensive asset management, automated email, dedicated workflows for cyber security and integration testing, and tight integration between all systems and services.