U.S. federal government agencies do not lack for data. In fact, they are awash in data of every kind to help inform decision-making, operations, public services and more. Agencies must manage complex, highly sensitive, and mission-critical datasets across multiple disciplines including finance, healthcare, defense, and supply chain.
These agencies rely on accurate, up-to-date information to help inform and complete their missions while maintaining the public’s trust. Federal agencies often face the challenging task of collecting, organizing, storing, analyzing and acting on the required information. Agencies have renewed requirements to improve efficiencies such as increased automation through the application of AI, interoperability of solutions to leverage existing IT investments, and scale to support handling rapidly increasing data holdings. These requirements also must consider the realities of data silos across organizations and agencies, data restrictions and handling requirements, facilitating data sharing and discoverability across workloads that easily can run into Petabyte (PB) size and scale.
Oracle has worked closely with government agencies for nearly five decades – from data management to cloud computing and much more. The company’s very first customer was an intelligence agency. Oracle’s data platform is an ecosystem of products and services that offers flexibility to host a variety of data workloads. It is well suited to assist in addressing the stated government challenges in complex environments at all levels of classification. The platform offers services and features that doesn’t limit organizations to a single environment or vendor.
The data platform is informed by common challenges and requirements voiced by Oracle customers across the U.S. government and its partners. Government agencies can run their mission-critical workloads on Oracle’s U.S. National Security Regions (ONSRs) and U.S. Government Cloud regions which are available for workloads up to Top Secret.
Figure 1 – Oracle’s data platform ecosystem
The sheer size, breadth and scope of many federal agencies is the very definition of a complex IT environment. Agencies commonly have several distinct databases, data stores, and processing solutions from various vendors throughout their enterprises. Often, these data stores and data processing solutions reside on hybrid cloud or other complex environments. These realities make it very challenging for efficiently processing data and deriving insights in a unified way. But key features within the data platform can support and help solve challenges across these sprawling environments. These include:
Scale: Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse provides an easy-to-use, fully autonomous cloud database service that scales elastically and delivers high performance. Auto-scaling allows for cost savings and consistent performance by increasing compute resources only when needed and scaling down resources when workloads decrease, automatically. (Consider the needs of the U.S. Postal Service during the Christmas holiday season vs. other times of the year as just one example.)
Sharing and Interoperability: Agencies often have a wide variety of disparate data stores and vendors hosting their data. Autonomous Data Warehouse includes Data Studio, which offers easy and self-service data load, transform, and data-sharing features, including Delta Share. This allows users to securely share read-only data with users outside OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) with a variety of vendor data/analytic tools. Autonomous Data Warehouse also supports the creation of external tables (supporting peta-byte scale queries), which point to files stored in OCI or leading hyperscaler object stores, allowing data to be analyzed without the need to move or copy data.
Discoverability: Government agencies have invested heavily in numerous database and related technologies over the decades. With Oracle GoldenGate they are able to integrate these legacy data stores with older data warehouses and modern data lakes and data lakehouses. Oracle GoldenGate is a unique data replication technology that captures source data from Oracle Databases in real-time and makes it available to data consumers. This is in stark contrast to batch processing alternatives that restrict data movement to off hours.
GoldenGate is powerful, open and extensive – with 100s of data connectors, it moves data across databases, big data platforms, and streaming event brokers. Oracle GoldenGate is also useful to integrate legacy data stores with current real-time data and AI vectors to increase the accuracy and timeliness of GenAI model training and deployment.
Modernize Workflows: Oracle’s data platform can help improve end-user experiences in any agency and lower the barrier to productivity. Whether you’re a government analyst, developer, or general technologist, you can benefit from the data platform’s workflow capabilities through integrated AI features to drive innovation using various Oracle applications that provide natural language interactions. Example use cases for developers, analyst, and technologists include:
- Driving Efficiencies with AI – Developers can leverage an AI assistant while creating data-centric applications with APEX while analysts can use Autonomous Database’s Select AI feature to ask natural language questions, which are then translated to schema-specific SQL thereby increasing productivity.
- RAG for all – Developers, analyst, and technologist alike can benefit from Select AI for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). All three user types can benefit from natural language interactions that are informed by their agency specific data. For example, Select AI can reference text files in object storage (i.e., storing agency data) to create vectors stores (via Oracle Database 23ai) for RAG to inform natural language responses with organization specific data. An agency analyst use-case for RAG is to assist in writing and reviewing tasks, such as policy reviews, while at the same time providing citations for the analyst to reference such as agency specific contract details.
- Driving Innovation – Developers and technologist working for agencies are often seeking ways to drive innovation but are limited in using real-world mission data (e.g., agency specific information) due to sensitivities. Select AI can be used for synthetic data generation and help inform application development and technology advancements without using actual mission data, which might be highly restricted and not accessible to developers and technologist.
Oracle’s data platform offers agencies the tools and resources needed to address tough challenges around complex hybrid environments while modernizing workflows. With the data platform, agencies can leverage tools integrated with AI or create new AI features that will support custom workflows.
While government has unique challenges accessing data with a unified view and deriving actionable insights in a timely manner, it can be done. To learn more about how Oracle supports defense and intelligence agencies, please visit our dedicated DoD/Intelligence website.
Your management can also contact Oracle offices in the Washington, D.C., area that support all federal agencies.