Joe Foster joined NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as the Cloud Computing Program Manager in September 2018. He designed and built the Agency’s Mission Cloud Platform (MCP), achieving an Authorization To Operate (ATO) at a Moderate Security Level in only 10 months. Since the ATO, MCP has grown rapidly to now supporting almost 160 projects across all 10 NASA centers and still growing. For his work on MCP and thought leadership in the Federal space around Cloud Computing, Foster has won numerous awards including the 2020 Robert H Goddard Award, the 2021 NASA Agency Honors Award, and the 2021 Association for Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM) Leadership in Cloud Computing award winner.
Foster previously served as an IT Program Manager and Data Scientist with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) from 2010–2018, where he migrated 60 separate activities from on-premises data centers to the cloud, spearheaded the adoption of the DevOps Pipeline, and conceptualized the system being used by the Agency to plan and track the cloud migration of 650+ applications. He served on NGA’s Cloud Leadership Team, Cloud Adoption Management Group, and DevOps Council, as well as two Intelligence Community-wide Cloud forums, the Intelligence Community IT Enterprise (ICITE) steering committee, and the ICITE Mission Users Group Forum. Foster also served in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and as a private sector consultant. Foster is a U.S. Army Combat veteran who served as a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives (CBRNE) Engineer from 1998–2005.