Bharat Amin
CIO & Executive Vice President, Huntington Ingalls Industries
Each day, Bharat Amin leads approximately 800 technology and security professionals toward achieving the cybersecurity and IT mission: protecting, strengthening and enabling HII’s business, which impacts the nation’s freedom.
“As EVP and CIO, I envision a technology strategy that enables a modern enterprise services approach to sustain the goals and objectives of HII for years to come,” Amin said.
Amin has led a drive to digitalize the business at HII. In today’s evolving digital economy – in addition to the difficulties of working amid a pandemic – his cybersecurity and IT teams have risen to the challenge; unlocking new technology capabilities to enable the business, such as cloud applications, augmented reality and virtual reality, 5G and HII’s most recent digital defense modernization program that will create new cybersecurity, infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for the company. These efforts enable the HII workforce to be more mobile, efficient and effective, all while keeping the company safe and secure.
Amin is also heavily focused on a zero trust architecture and maturing the cybersecurity strategy on identity, detection, protection response and recovery; shifting the IT and business conversations from a cost decision to a value discussion; leveraging the external ecosystem for industry innovation, economies of scale, sustaining capabilities and reduction in steady state spend; and aligning the technology strategies of three autonomous divisions under one umbrella to deliver future enterprisewide applications supporting HR, recruiting and payroll operations.
“What excites me the most is bringing three HII divisions together to form a ‘digital alliance,’ creating a force multiplier of people, processes and tools that mature our cybersecurity operations, create efficiencies, reduce costs, and deliver secure and reliable information to the right people at the right time,” Amin said. “These efforts ensure that HII can continue to deliver for our defense customer.”
Why Watch
HII’s digital defense modernization journey is just beginning, and this transformation effort is foundational and necessary to improve the company’s cybersecurity posture and position HII to address the requirements of the forthcoming CMMS program.
The digital defense modernization has become the cornerstone to enable the HII strategy and it encompasses four modernization pillars that will be achieved over time: enterprise cybersecurity operations, unified collaboration, enterprise network and identity. The program will leverage economies-of-scale opportunities to consolidate the capabilities of HII’s three divisions.