“It’s a mission that doesn’t slow down and it doesn’t operate in a controlled environment; it’s dynamic, it’s global, it’s often under pressure,” said Allen Strunk, G-6 Director at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, summing up a central dilemma federal IT leaders described at the “Federal Executive Forum IT Modernization and Transformation in Government 2026 Progress & Best Practices” webinar.
Who spoke and why it mattered
The panel brought together three perspectives: Allen Strunk of the Army Corps of Engineers, C. Melonie Cannon, Chief Information Officer for the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, and John Larregui, Associate Director for Public Sector Sales at Verizon. Their focus was practical: how to deliver secure, seamless connectivity across a highly dispersed federal workforce while balancing cybersecurity, mobility, and user experience.
Army Corps of Engineers: standardization to reduce complexity
Strunk framed modernization as an exercise in reducing operational friction. He described the Corps’ mission as continuous, distributed and frequently operating under pressure, and argued that standardization is the primary lever to improve reliability without sacrificing the flexibility field missions require. By reducing complexity and ensuring consistent service delivery, Strunk said, the Corps aims to prevent technology from becoming a barrier to mission success while supporting field operations, vital infrastructure projects, and disaster response.
State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security: secure access around the globe
C. Melonie Cannon emphasized the scale and risk profile of a globally distributed security workforce. “We are, of course, a global mission. You know our mission is diplomacy. Every place you have an embassy or consulate, you have someone from Diplomatic Security in those areas,” she said, stressing that staff must be able to access systems securely from any location while operational security is preserved. Cannon also highlighted a tension familiar in federal IT: overly restrictive controls can impair usability and push users toward workarounds or shadow IT, undermining both security and mission effectiveness.
Verizon: AI and flexible, scalable network architectures
From the vendor perspective, John Larregui described how modern network architectures are evolving to be more dynamic and responsive to changing mission needs. “The biggest thing is being able to utilize things like AI, so that your network can always be moving and changing as it needs to be, so it’s going to be more dynamic, faster, and quicker,” he said. Larregui argued those capabilities allow agencies to adapt infrastructure quickly, providing secure, high-performance connectivity for users wherever they are and enabling faster responses to evolving operational requirements.
How technologists, procurement leaders, and end users are responding
- Technologists and security teams will prioritize reducing complexity and enforcing consistent standards across footprints, following the Corps’ emphasis on standardization to maintain reliability while preserving mission flexibility.
- Procurement leaders and IT managers will watch for flexible, scalable architectures and vendor capabilities—particularly AI-enabled network functions—that Larregui identified as enabling rapid adaptation to changing mission needs.
- End users in the field and Diplomatic Security personnel will press for usable access from any location, reflecting Cannon’s warning that excessive restriction risks prompting workarounds and shadow IT that weaken operational security.
The thread tying these perspectives together is straightforward: modernization is less about swapping equipment and more about reshaping networks to be secure, scalable and user-focused. Across the panel, mobility, flexibility and standardization were presented not as competing priorities but as complementary elements of mission-ready connectivity. The concrete tension the panel left on the table is how agencies will operationalize AI-driven, dynamic networks while preventing the usability-driven workarounds that, as Cannon noted, can create new vulnerabilities.
Read the original event summary: Mission-Ready Connectivity: How Federal Leaders Are Modernizing Networks for Security and Scale
