Jason Payne
Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Federal
As CTO of Microsoft Federal, Jason Payne is proud of the work the federal team has been doing on zero trust to help the U.S. government unlock and strengthen its full inter- and intra-agency cyber capabilities.
“Jason is a well-respected innovator that I am proud to have as part of our leadership team,” said Rick Wagner, president of Microsoft Federal. “He is a trusted partner that puts the needs of our federal customers first. With more than 20 years of industry experience, he is consistently developing groundbreaking solutions for our customers and helps us further solidify Microsoft’s position as the leader in federal digital transformation.”
The volume and complexity of the work the government has done ⏤ at the thought leadership, education, advocacy and technical leadership levels ⏤ has led to tremendous progress in meeting mandates over the last year.
Most agencies now have a clear, compelling zero trust strategy, and they all have implementations of the minimum bar as defined in the original executive order ⏤ from multifactor authentication to modernizing legacy applications via secure cloud technologies.
“Being part of the process with our U.S. government customers and seeing implementations come to life has been tremendously gratifying,” Payne said. “One of the best examples I’ve seen that’s showcased implementation at government scale has been the Navy’s commitment to quickly enabling secure remote work by strengthening its comprehensive zero trust architecture to protect identities, networks, devices, applications and data no matter the location of Navy personnel.”
Why Watch
Looking ahead, Payne’s team will continue to focus on enabling vast opportunities through its classified cloud framework. This comes to life within the defense industrial base ecosystem, where mission platform collaboration holds a whole new era of innovation for the industry ⏤ in everything from machine learning and AI to advanced networking and secure 5G capabilities at the tactical edge.
On the civilian side, Payne’s team sees it in climate science, pandemic responses and beyond where data sets can be pulled together to drive insights. Today’s technology maturity will help Microsoft Federal address any number of human and governmental challenges or mission needs.
“We have tremendous opportunity to come alongside our government agency partners to solve big challenges,” Payne said. “I’ll always be a technologist, so I love seeing and showing how really cool technology is breaking down some of the toughest barriers to progress. To steal from Winston Churchill, ‘A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.’ I’m super bullish on how we can and will continue to press through the difficulties to get to the opportunity over the horizon.”