Justin Shirk
Managing Director & Federal Cloud & Secure Mission Lead, Accenture Federal Services
In 2023, Justin Shirk’s team accelerated the transformation of Accenture Federal Services inside to better serve their customers outside.
“We had a lightbulb moment: We had this great tool Cloud Tracker, but we weren’t fully using it for our own cloud accounts,” he said.
Cloud Tracker is Accenture Federal’s built-for-federal FinOps product that works across all four CSPs and is deployed across the U.S. federal government.
“Once you have the data in one place, development teams and client teams alike have the confidence to make commitments — like buying savings plans & reserved instances — really maximizing dollars spent,” Shirk said.
Shirk has a fully connected view of the cloud.
“Enabling clients to save millions lets them invest in emerging technologies like cloud-based Generative AI and High Performance Computing (HPC),” he said. “The cloud is really the center of gravity in this hyper convergence of technology.”
Shirk’s approach to hyper convergence in cloud and strategy is a stand-out, delivering value both to clients and the company, said Ira Entis, Accenture Federal Services’ growth and strategy lead.
“He drives disruption throughout the business, inside and out,” Entis added.
Why Watch
In 2023, Shirk’s team recognized that the sheer scale of defense applications to be migrated to the cloud in the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability era required a new approach.
“The United States Department of Defense spends more on IT than all other government agencies combined. Most of their apps have yet to migrate to the cloud — and with JWCC awarded, the flood gates are open,” Shirk said. “The DOD, and the government writ large, want to get to the cloud quickly en masse while still modernizing. We built our Cloud Migration and Modernization Factory to match the scale of Accenture to the scale of the Government’s challenges in migrating tens of thousands of applications to the cloud.”
Accenture’s Cloud Migration and Modernization Factory enables rapid modernization and migrations of systems requiring the highest level of security and protection, meeting the strict security standards even for those operating within the compartmented communities of the DOD and IC. The factory service delivers fully accreditable security baselines and application archetypes for any classification level.