Rising Star: Kelsey Werder Monaghan

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Consolidating IT infrastructure is a challenge for any organization. At an agency as decentralized and technology-intensive as NASA, the task is even more daunting. Dell Technologies’ Kelsey Werder Monaghan is proving essential to that effort.

She worked with NASA officials to launch a single cloud operating model at two primary sites with the goals of improving agility for space and research programs and strengthening the agency’s Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act score. The new architecture combines hundreds of physical and virtual servers, includes infinitely scalable object storage and unifies the infrastructure with Dell’s connecting fabric.

In addition, Monaghan collaborated with 11 critical stakeholders at varying levels within NASA to consolidate disparate compute, storage and licensing agreements into one enterprise offering. Her advocacy and the customer trust she built facilitated collaborations with Splunk, channel partners, and multiple CIOs and organizations within NASA.

Those efforts helped enable a range of new capabilities for NASA, including an on-premises cloud offering, AI-powered analytics and agile cybersecurity. The project also reduced operating costs and the time to result for multiple NASA missions.

Finally, Monaghan and her team worked closely with the Cybersecurity and Privacy Division in NASA’s Office of the CIO to help ensure a consistent security policy, strengthen risk-based security controls and track key security metrics to gauge compliance and effectiveness.