For any government agency, unpredictability is a central challenge. We are now discovering that nowhere is that more true than in building and securing AI infrastructure. The extraordinary complexity of federal agency IT architectures and the external threats to those architectures pose distinct challenges to any security modernization effort. Like most enterprises, these are likely hybrid environments with at least two or three public clouds in use, a complex stack of point products, on-prem services, data stores, and the puzzle of automating across these environments. The complexity involved in all this creates unpredictability. The ultimate challenge is the need to secure a constantly morphing and near permanently porous architecture.
The security requirements and compliance standards are typically different for each government agency, making flexibility the key to any solution, a flexibility that can accommodate any workload or environment needs. This is the kind of flexibility built into Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation 9.0 (VCF 9.0) and supported by the inherent security enhancements and advantages of private cloud.
Private Cloud and VMware Cloud Foundation 9
There’s no mystery to the requirement for security modernization, since Federal agencies continue to modernize their overall IT infrastructures while working to balance cost, security, and compliance requirements. Government CIOs and CISOs need better tools to secure critical federal workloads, implement newly resilient infrastructure, and leverage AI to improve mission outcomes. Broadcom’s VCF 9 provides agencies a private cloud platform that addresses these novel challenges.
VCF 9.0 changes the game for government agencies that must also abide by strict compliance requirements and data sovereignty demands. Private clouds built on VCF 9.0 already offer inherent advantages over public cloud: having direct management and control over their data, IT resources, and performance.
In addition to those advantages, VCF 9.0 now enables government agencies to build and secure private cloud infrastructure for AI models rapidly and efficiently, addressing policy mandates as they’re defined. It enhances private cloud architecture with advanced security, resilience, and compliance features, offering a unified strategy for infrastructure hardening, threat prevention, and cyber recovery to safeguard against complex cyber-attacks.
Inherent Trust
Let’s focus on one significant advancement: VCF 9.0 represents a genuinely different security approach to Zero Trust. Many technologists inside and outside the public sector think about zero trust as a “product,” a discrete solution that can be bolted onto their IT environments. But the real message of zero trust sits right there in its name: There’s no trust in “zero trust.” Federal agencies should not implicitly trust anything — from any source — externally or internally. One cannot “bolt on” zero trust. Zero trust requires government agencies to architect their systems differently so that there is no procedure that doesn’t require verification before proceeding. VCF 9.0 provides that different architecture.
The VCF 9.0 approach to zero trust replaces the concept of trust with continuous verification. It ensures that all activities throughout the platform are secured and compliant by design for intrinsic zero trust architecture and automated policy enforcement, with policy-driven controls at every layer: compute, network, and storage. For example, VCF 9.0 introduces a new security operations dashboard which allows for continuous monitoring of security controls and compliance posture, providing greater holistic visibility and (when challenged) faster time to resolution.
We call this new approach, “inherent trust.”
Simplified and Integrated
VCF 9.0 has been engineered to solve multiple problems common to agencies striving to meet federal AI and security modernization requirements. It simplifies updates and provides a higher level of cybersecurity overall by combining what previously have been multiple separate security features, fully integrating them into the private cloud platform itself.
It’s undeniable today that one of the most bewildering areas of IT modernization is in adopting AI, given the profusion of standalone products, so once again Broadcom has taken an integrated approach. VCF 9.0 provides platform support for emerging AI and data workloads with native support for GPU and other accelerator-powered applications, multi-tenant AI-as-a-Service, and secure deployment and governance of generative and agentic AI models within federal private clouds.
Consistent with that platform design, VCF 9.0 provides operators and administrators more visibility and control while maximizing the use of inherently more secure native API’s — increasing overall security while reducing the complexity of separate security around third-party or open source applications and services.
Securing An Unpredictable, Porous AI Architecture
We’re proud at Broadcom to help secure the IT infrastructure of nearly every federal government agency. They are finding that a private cloud platform meets their challenges by using a single platform focused on a single environment. It enables agency IT teams to provide trusted versions of APIs and data sources, and now verified algorithmic and model sources in the AI era. VCF 9.0 bakes into its infrastructure all these capabilities, while including the richest availability of verified, secure, and compliant software tools, models, algorithms, and developer libraries.
In doing so, Broadcom is helping government agencies keep pace with a new day where missions evolve fast, supplying solutions they need to manage unpredictability, securely resilient AI infrastructure, and tools to advance their modernization goals, all to handle whatever comes next.