Rising Star: Mahtab Emdadi

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By pioneering a new way to keep the State Department’s email and other communications running smoothly, Mahtab Emdadi may have also helped keep U.S. foreign policy running smoothly.

Unpredictable outages wreaked havoc with the department’s legacy communications systems and made it difficult for employees to maintain their foreign relations mission. In her role as a sales director at Dell, Emdadi recommended that officials implement an infrastructure based on high-availability disaster recovery and information resource management so that systems could continue operating despite outages.

She incorporated a three-site architecture that was built for continuous availability. With automated failover for applications, the technology supports scheduled system maintenance downtime and guards against unscheduled outages. As a result, diplomats have more reliable access to crucial information during data center migrations, application upgrades, user errors and network outages.

Beyond making diplomatic life easier for State employees, Emdadi’s efforts have saved nearly $10 million in infrastructure costs while reducing the time spent on testing and maintenance. The next phase of the program will take those capabilities to the cloud via a multi-cloud architecture as a managed service. The move will maintain system resiliency while incorporating features such as self-service, IT chargeback/showback and automation.