Rising Star: David Catanoso
Director, Enterprise Cloud Solutions Office, Department of Veteran Affairs
David Catanoso has made significant strides on a pioneering VA Enterprise Cloud initiative that seeks to give the agency the agility, scalability, security and cost-effective services that are essential to its digital transformation and IT modernization strategies.
VA has set an aggressive schedule for migrating to VAEC, with a goal of moving 350 applications, or half of its IT portfolio, by 2024. Thanks to Catanoso’s efforts, some of the agency’s premier mission-critical applications have already moved to the cloud.
For instance, VAEC absorbed the Veterans Benefits Management System, which supports as many as 4,000 simultaneous users, stores almost 900 million documents and provides constant access for U.S. veterans around the world. VA’s My HealtheVet portal, which is used by 82 percent of veterans, has also successfully migrated to VAEC.
Those are just two of the more than 40 systems that he has helped the VA migrate to the cloud. Others include VA’s Community Care Provider Profile Management System, the Online Patient Self-Scheduling system and the White House VA Hotline.
In addition, Catanoso led the effort to close a major VA data center in Culpeper, Va. He avoided $50 million a year in operating costs by decommissioning four systems and successfully migrating 14 others to VAEC ahead of schedule.
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