#071 - USA’s First Air Force and Space Force Chief Software Officer, Nicolas Chaillan

Data Center Therapy

You ever envision updating the firmware of a weapons system on your fighter jet while you’re flying it?

No? That makes sense. But for the people trying to evolve our military’s ossified bureaucracies and systems, that vision is indeed a reality.

Your hosts of this Data Center Therapy episode, Matt ‘I’ve got a lock on the target’ Yette and Alec ‘It's a UNIX system! I know this!’ Taylor welcome the United States of America’s very first Chief Software Officer, Nicolas M. Chaillan to the DCT virtual studios. Nicolas shares his background, how his career at the DoD evolved, and what he sees in the future of cyber-warfare and security for both the military and American enterprise. It’s a fascinating look inside the inner workings of some quite large organizations, our own U.S. Air Force and Space Force branches.

During this show, you’ll also gain some understanding of:

• How agility differs in the private sector versus the military, and how Nicolas attempted the impossible by both steering his organizations and by letting his contributors grow and explore their own technology skills and practices.
• How politics plays a role in the development of software systems, and how challenges with egos and inertia clash with evolving the processes in that development.
• Nicolas’ thoughts on Hypersonic weapons systems, Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and how some of those have already impacted us and caused great concern in the Air Force and Space Force.

You, our business and enterprise-oriented listeners will also get a great overview of the practices (some of them simple or less difficult to implement than you might think!) that you could be doing today to secure your critical data and systems, like implementing Single Sign On, Zero Trust, and Endpoint Protection solutions. As always, if you enjoy this episode, please like, share and subscribe wherever quality podcasts like Data Center Therapy can be found. Thanks for listening, stay safe and soar high, DCT friends!