A practical guide to public sector telemetry modernization

The new realities of telemetry modernization

Public sector IT and security teams support the digital systems people rely on every day. When those systems process benefits claims, coordinate emergency responses, protect classified networks, and keep critical infrastructure online, visibility gaps can reach far beyond a missed quarterly target.

At the same time, the volume of machine-generated data is accelerating faster than most teams can manage. Every cloud service, endpoint, application, sensor, and AI tool adds another stream of logs, metrics, and traces to an already strained pipeline. Agencies are discovering that moving to the cloud doesn’t automatically solve the data problem. In many cases, it intensifies it.

The public sector data reality

zettabytes of data are projected to be created globally in 2025 alone

of organizations now use cloud services, generating telemetry at unprecedented scale

of organizations report that cloud environments are more complex to secure than on-premises infrastructure

compound annual growth rate is projected for machine-generated data across modern cloud environments

approximate increase in FedRAMP cloud authorizations by federal agencies between 2019 and 2023

Public sector teams still need to modernize securely, control costs, and support mission-critical operations with lean teams and tight budgets. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cribl help agencies move forward with more choice, control, and flexibility, without adding complexity.

Modernize telemetry without operational disruption

For public sector agencies, telemetry modernization isn’t just about moving to the cloud. It’s about moving without losing visibility, control, or compliance along the way. As the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, AWS gives agencies the foundation they have been waiting for: more than 200 fully featured cloud services, a security and compliance infrastructure designed for the most demanding federal environments, and the scalability to grow without the burden of maintaining underlying hardware. Together, AWS and Cribl offer the infrastructure to modernize at scale and the data control layer to manage telemetry across every step of the journey. Agencies can validate each phase of modernization as environments change, without forcing a disruptive cutover or locking teams into a single destination.

The answers IT and security leaders have been waiting for:

Cribl provides the capabilities agencies need to answer all three. Cribl Stream governs how data moves across the entire environment. Cribl Edge reaches into legacy infrastructure to ensure no source is left outside the pipeline. Together, they give agencies consistent telemetry coverage across legacy, cloud, and hybrid environments from day one of migration.

That same foundation extends into how agencies access and retain telemetry over time. Cribl Search makes historical data queryable without requiring movement or re-ingestion, while Cribl Lake provides cost-efficient retention for high-volume security, compliance, and operational data. Together, AWS and Cribl help agencies maintain visibility, control costs, and keep critical data accessible as modernization scales.

Cribl Stream

A vendor-neutral pipeline that:

• Collects telemetry from on-premises, cloud, and third-party sources

• Normalizes, enriches, and routes data to the right destination

• Filters duplicate and low-value data before it reaches cost-intensive tools

Cribl Edge

A scalable edge-based agent that:

• Collects telemetry from legacy agents and hosted machines

• Consolidates agents to eliminate duplicate collection and simplify management

• Centralizes agent management for fleet-wide upgrades and configurations

Cribl Search

An AI-guided search experience that:

• Queries data in place without requiring you to move the data

• Speeds up security investigations and historical compliance audits

• Reduces the need to route all your data into cost-intensive analytics tools

Cribl Lake

A cost-efficient storage that:

• Retains full-fidelity, high-volume telemetry for long-term retention

• Keeps historical and compliance data accessible without overloading your SOC

• Reduces storage costs by separating retention from real-time analysis

Reduce costs without compromising compliance

For public sector IT and security leaders, budget and compliance conversations always merge. Mandates like M-26-14 shift the framework to a risk based, prioritized logging strategy, while M-22- 09 demands deep visibility into network activity, device behavior, and user access for Zero Trust. The challenge is that treating all data the same way breaks budgets and tools. Forcing every log, metric, and trace into an expensive analytics tier regardless of its operational value inflates licensing costs, degrades query performance, and buries the high severity signals analysts depend on.

M-26-14 addresses this by separating real time event monitoring from long term investigation readiness, creating a clear opportunity for deliberate data tiering. Compliance and investigative logs can live in low cost, retention optimized storage like Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), while high value detection data goes directly to the right system of analysis. With Cribl, agencies apply policy based controls that align data routing with actual cost and compliance needs. This controls costs, satisfies federal mandates, and maintains visibility across cloud, on premises, and hybrid environments.

Govern telemetry for AI-driven workflows

Public sector agencies are moving quickly from AI curiosity to AI evaluation. The opportunity is real. AI tools can help teams accelerate investigations, reduce manual work, and surface useful signals faster. But before agencies can use those tools responsibly, they need control over which telemetry is approved for AI use and how that data is prepared before it moves downstream.

That is where telemetry governance becomes mission-critical. AI-ready workflows depend on telemetry that agencies can trust. Teams need confidence that sensitive information has been protected, governance requirements have been met, and only approved data is being used by downstream AI systems. Without that control, teams can struggle to know which data is safe to use, which fields should stay protected, and which destinations are approved.

Cribl helps agencies prepare and govern approved telemetry for AI use. With Cribl Stream, teams can normalize data, remove duplicates, and mask or redact sensitive fields before downstream use. They can also enforce consistent governance policies before data reaches approved AI systems.

This gives agencies a practical path to AI adoption without giving up control of their data. Teams can evaluate AI-driven workflows with greater confidence in how data is governed, protected, and prepared for use.

Maintain visibility at petabyte scale

As agencies adopt the cloud and data volumes surge, teams need to keep data flowing without losing visibility across legacy on-premises and new cloud environments. Cribl preserves operational context between on-premises tools and new cloud destinations. Teams can validate data flows, confirm monitoring coverage, and route critical security signals exactly where they need to go before committing to a full cutover.

Maintaining visibility at scale is harder than expected. Turning on a service like AWS CloudTrail generates a significant amount of telemetry data, and adding VPC flow logs, endpoint telemetry, application metrics, and security feeds multiplies that volume fast. Cribl processes telemetry at a petabyte scale, keeping systems performing and teams informed as environments grow.

For agencies spread across headquarters, regional offices, and remote sites, AWS and Cribl make distributed visibility practical. AWS offers a scalable cloud foundation, while Cribl extends collection, normalization, and routing across all infrastructure. Teams get consistent telemetry without forcing every location onto the same tool or timeline. The result is agency-wide or statewide visibility with centralized control over how data is routed, shaped, and accessed.

Customer story: Modernization at mission speed

How Accenture Federal Services helped a large civilian agency strengthen cloud visibility and data control on AWS

A large U.S. civilian agency was moving critical applications and services to AWS while keeping digital systems available to more than 150 million Americans. Accenture Federal Services supported the migration, helping the agency move front-end web services, back-end data services, and operational workloads into the cloud.

But as the environment expanded, so did the telemetry challenge. Data was coming from container logs, AWS CloudTrail, HTTP events, encrypted syslog data, and cloud-hosted third-party systems. The team needed a way to unify and route that data without slowing the migration or adding complexity.

With Cribl Stream, Accenture Federal Services gave the agency a flexible telemetry control layer across AWS workloads. Teams could organize, enrich, and route data to security audit systems and operational tools, while using live preview to validate changes before pushing them into production.

"What brought Cribl into the environment was the need to unify data. Cribl’s UI, live preview capabilities, and workflows made it easy to configure and manage data pipelines effectively."

Cesar Deleon, Senior Security Consulting Manager, Accenture Federal Services

Start modernizing with Cribl and AWS

Public sector agencies that modernize successfully share a common approach:

• They move at their own pace rather than committing to a single high-risk cutover

• They validate before they commit

• They build a telemetry foundation that supports secure modernization, cost-efficient retention, governed AI adoption, and scalable security operations.

AWS and Cribl make each of those steps operationally achievable. AWS provides the infrastructure, the services, and the compliance foundation that makes modernization possible at scale. Cribl provides the data control layer that ensures telemetry moving through that infrastructure is clean, correctly routed, and auditable from day one. AWS and Cribl give public sector agencies the choice and control to modernize on their own terms.