Jay Hawkins, Director of Data Center and Cloud Engineering at the Department of Veterans Affairs, is being honored in Category 4: Using Innovative Technologies to Deliver Simple, Seamless, and Secure Services for leading a major modernization of the infrastructure supporting VA healthcare, benefits, and digital services. Jay oversees an enterprise environment encompassing more than 116,000 servers, 1,200 storage appliances, and 200 petabytes of data nationwide.

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In 2025, Jay led VA’s transition away from an aging, costly virtualization platform to OpenShift Virtualization, creating a more standardized, flexible, and resilient technology foundation. He brought together funding and priorities from 14 separate IT and program groups, aligned a $265 million annual acquisition portfolio and $1.3 billion asset lifecycle, and coordinated technology partners through a 20-month evaluation and planning effort.

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The modernization is already delivering measurable improvements. Automation has reduced manual touchpoints by more than 90%, while modernization deployment times have decreased by nearly 70%. Faster provisioning and deployment cycles allow engineering teams to deliver improvements more efficiently while reducing technical debt and operational risk. By breaking down infrastructure barriers and modernizing the technology behind VA services, Jay is helping ensure Veterans and employees have access to more reliable, responsive, and resilient digital systems.