How IT platform focus and governance help Orlando International Airport’s CIO protect public trust

Major U.S. gateways like Orlando International Airport offer a picture window into a stark reality faced by many state and local governments: Their IT infrastructure serves as more than just digital plumbing for agency operations; it has become a critical 24/7 lifeline for public services essential to regional economies.

As reliance on these networks has shifted from supporting backend operations to serving as the front door to government services, they’ve also grown exponentially more complex, leaving them vulnerable to cyber threats and unexpected outages.

Ensuring infrastructure remains resilient — yet flexible enough to meet ever-changing demands — is just one of the concerns that weighs daily on the mind of Rishma M. Khimji, CIO of the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority.

Khimji likens her job to overseeing a city within a city. On the front end, Orlando International Airport must reliably meet the digital expectations and information needs of nearly 58 million passengers arriving and departing each year. That includes supporting the retail stores where they shop and dine, the ticket counters, the security and boarding checkpoints they pass through, and the baggage claim operations that can leave a lasting impression on every traveler’s experience. 

But it also includes the backend systems essential to airline operations and to federal agency partners, including the Transportation Security Administration and Customs and Border Protection (to name a few). All told, Khimji must ensure the resiliency of over 60 IT systems, she said during an executive interview panel on the role of infrastructure for state and local governments, hosted by Scoop News Group for StateScoop and sponsored by Verizon and Cisco.

In these settings, service degradation or downtime isn’t just a costly IT inconvenience; it creates cascading operational, economic, public trust, and safety consequences.

“We talk a lot about the unseen cost of downtime—and what I like to call the return on reputation,” says Khimji. “The more we understand that, the more critical the risks become. We have to understand where those failure points can be, and how we then safeguard against those,” she said. It’s not just the airport’s reputation at stake, but also the reputations and revenues of airlines, retailers and supporting businesses at stake as well, Khimji stressed.

To manage this environment, Khimji’s team has established a multi-layered connectivity network that combines wired, wireless, and cellular systems, ensuring that if a physical link fails, a secondary path immediately restores bandwidth.

Given that public agencies have only so much they can invest in a given year, Khimji and engineering experts from Verizon and Cisco pointed to several steps public agencies should consider taking to improve their resilience.

Prioritizing a platform-first strategy

“The number one thing that any organization should do is that initial assessment of the environment to really identify the hidden risks,” said Jason Fields, Leader, Partner Sales at Cisco, during the panel discussion. “Dependency mapping is key. Organizations need to shift from managing the individual components to really managing the systems of interaction.”

Rather than relying on post-mortems to discover why systems fail, he urged organizations to conduct “pre-mortems to identify those single points of failure where minor configuration errors could trigger a cascading outage.” 

Additionally, Fields recommended:

• “The biggest thing that organizations need to do is shift from project-based spending to platform-based investment” and adopt a modular, standardized architecture “to reduce the surface area for errors and enable predictable, scalable maintenance. Right now, a lot of organizations don’t realize this, but they’re actually paying a silo tax.”
• Replace manual intervention with automated lifecycle management to eliminate human error variables and ensure a consistent security posture across the environment.
• Implement zero-trust architecture, including segmented environments, and the means to enforce strict access controls, “so that we can reduce the blast radius of any single failure.”

Jason Trella, Associate Director of Sales Engineering, supporting state and local government and education (SLED) at Verizon, agreed that targeted audits across systems are an essential step to improving resilience. He recommended that public sector leaders “abandon all-or-nothing overhauls” and focus instead on “risk prioritization.” 

He urged officials to look for opportunities to bundle network modernization into broader capital expenditures. Combining network upgrades with physical maintenance, like tarmac repairs, allows departments to share costs and maximize utility, ensuring that physical investments also strengthen the digital backbone.

He also suggested that IT leaders prioritize four strategic areas in mapping out their infrastructure planning, including real-time data readiness, bandwidth capacity for automation technologies, power and cooling infrastructure to support rising IT demands, and multiple governance frameworks to accommodate the growing reliance on AI.

Khimji echoed Trella’s point about governance. While technology provides the foundation, “it’s really the governance that’s structured around it” that determines recovery speed. Effective resilience requires clear system ownership, defined communication channels, and continuous testing. Khimji stressed the necessity of tabletop exercises to build “the muscle memory we are building together to ensure that we can really play out the resiliency part of it.”

Having the necessary governance in place, as well as network designs to support the dynamic flow of data, will become increasingly important as agencies prepare for AI-driven automated services, the executives said.  Without this proactive preparation, public sector agencies risk falling behind their operational demands. As Khimji warned, “Because in the end, if we don’t have good partnerships, if we don’t have good people with us that understand our nature of business and our priorities and our mission, then we’re going to continue to miss the bar every time.”

This article and the video panel discussion were produced by Scoop News Group, for StateScoop and sponsored by Verizon Business and Cisco.