Top Cloud Executives to Watch in 2023: Accenture Federal Services’ Justin Shirk

Justin Shirk

Managing Director, Cloud GTM & Secure Mission Lead, Accenture Federal Services

In 2022, Justin Shirk led the charge in getting one of his favorite customers and missions into the cloud for large-scale model-based simulation activities.

“The team did an excellent job collaborating across the government space with assessors, stakeholders and mission owners to really deliver value,” he said. “There are a lot of ‘sleepy’ areas in IT, particularly in the defense and national security space, that can be refactored in the cloud and just really enable people to simply do their job that they weren’t really able to do before easily.”

Tiffanny Gates, senior managing director and national security portfolio lead, said she’s had the privilege of working alongside Shirk for six years and has personally witnessed his leadership success, first at Novetta and now, following the acquisition, at Accenture Federal Services.

“Justin has led many impressive initiatives to help clients achieve breakthroughs by bringing together the best talent and disruptive technologies to set new standards for innovation in the national security cloud space,” she said. “Justin’s recent promotion to the role of cloud go-to-market lead at Accenture Federal Services was well-deserved, and I’m thrilled about his selection as Top Cloud Exec to Watch in federal contracting and government for 2022.”

Why Watch

In 2022, Shirk’s team was heavily focused on proliferating the synergy across Accenture Federal Services from the Novetta acquisition, particularly in the cloud space.

“Accenture Federal Services has a lot of great cloud assets and approaches, like the recently announced Velocity offering for AWS that greatly accelerates migrations,” he said. “At Novetta, we also had a lot of differentiated assets, too.”

One of those is CloudTracker, which provides a 360-degree view of the governance and financial operations of cloud, on both Azure and AWS. Cross-pollinating ⏤ and getting the tech and account teams to strategize in both directions to more rapidly enable cloud for customers ⏤ was really the theme of 2022.

“‘Think strategically, but act quickly and decisively,’ is a theme I’ve always carried for my career,” Shirk said. “In the U.S. federal market this is so important because the mission is so important, so real time, and so meaningful. You personally gel with like-minded folks as customers, and technologies. Once you’re in it, cloud in the federal government feels fast and really transformative. I love being a part of that.”

See the entire Top Cloud Execs to Watch in 2023 list here.