Through our Karsun Innovation Center (KIC) Internship Program each of our interns has a voice in the future of our company. These interns support the Research and Development teams rolling out new tools and processes across our organization. In the fall of 2019, we launched an Innovation Town Hall series. And once again our interns led the way. Presenting their projects to Karsun employees at these monthly meetings, they not only demoed new innovations currently in production they also explained customer pain points and opportunities for future enhancements. From SQL proxies to artificial intelligence, each of our interns had new innovative projects to share.
Interns learn and grow during their time with us. Shadowing team members in our Innovation Center and customer delivery teams, they participate in cross-functional projects, sharing their insights with teams across the company. They also sit down with senior executives, learn about their background, and dig a little deeper into their leadership experience as they share advice on things that helped them along the way.
The SQL Proxy Approach to Data Encryption with Anuraadha Kandadai
Anuraadhaa Kandadai is a recent graduate from Duke University with an MS in Economics and Computation. Over the past summer, she worked as an Intern at KIC. During her time at Karsun Anuraadha presented at both Karsun’s internal Innovation Town Hall and at DataOps NoVa, a local Meetup hosted by Karsun Solution’s Data Practice.
Anuraadhaa presented on the SQL Proxy Approach to Data Encryption. Her demo was a behind the scenes look at the SQL Proxy components followed by use cases for encryption. She also highlighted the challenges with complete encryption.
Apart from her work in the Karsun Innovation Center, she enjoys doing DIY art and craftwork. On her time in the Innovation Center, she said,
“For someone with a mixed background (economics and CS), I came in with an open mind and with a primary goal to learn as much as possible. After 3 months of the internship, I can confidently say that learning as an intern at KIC was immense. The range of work from working on Robotic Process Automation to building a “dead code” analyzer was exciting. I must also add that the team at KIC has been extremely helpful and always encouraging and patient with all the interns.”
JAM Stack Development with Sheetal Ramamoorthy
Sheetal Ramamoorthy presented at the Innovation Town Hall in January on using the JAM Stack for software development. JAM stands for Javascript-APIs-Markup, or as her talk described it in an employee town hall announcement, “the way to build high-performance serverless web-apps in no time.” In addition to the application built with JAM, her Karsun Innovation Center team hosted several “dojos” or employee-led training workshops. Sheetal and her team shared technical knowledge and introduced this development practice with the other teams serving Karsun’s customers.
Sheetal is a recent graduate with a Master’s Degree in Engineering Management with a focus on Analytics from the University of South Florida, Tampa. During her free time, she paints with friends and participates in 5k runs during the marathon season. On her time working with the Karsun Innovation Center and Development Practice she added,
“I had many different things on my mind during the internship. I wanted to learn what it is like to work in an office environment, have more experience in coding, and work with new programming languages and learned them too. As an intern I worked as a part of the KIC team doing data analysis for the CMMI audit and scripting in R language for regression equation and I hope to contribute more on the development of Innovation at Karsun.”
Compliance Masonry with Akhil Ramaswamy
During his Innovation Town Hall Akhil Ramaswamy demonstrated his work with the compliance masonry team. This is a capture and management framework (CMF) for documenting System Security Plans (SSPs.) Using compliance masonry, teams collaborate on documentation as structured data. Then they automatically format it in multiple ways useful to their teammates and compliance reviewers. This is both more secure and more efficient than the traditional approach which involves many team members manually managing large static Word and Excel documents.
During his time at Karsun Innovation Center, Akhil extended the compliance masonry to add two additional features. First, Control Check verifies if an application’s source code has the security control implemented and confirms the required documentation is available. Second, Extract inserts control documentation from the code and updates the open control YAML.
The KIC Internship Program is just one of several ways Karsun leverages its innovation resources to support employees and the local IT community. Previously seniors at George Mason University completed a rapid scaffolding prototype with a KIC mentor as part of their capstone project.
The KIC also includes five employee-centric Practice Areas. Led by a subject matter expert, these Practice Areas host innovation center days, training workshops, and connect employees to an expanding pool of resources. This program cultivates team members into Enterprise Modernization Experts while enabling new opportunities to serve our customers. Through KIC the Data Practices also reach back to the IT community. Many practice leads speak at industry events. Meanwhile teams in the Data Practice host a monthly DataOps NoVa Meetup at the Karsun Solutions Headquarters in Herndon, Virginia.
About Karsun Solutions
Karsun Solutions is a fast-growing, innovative, enterprise modernization firm. The Virginia Chamber of Commerce, Washington Business Journal, and Inc. all recognize Karsun Solutions among the fastest-growing companies in the Washington, D.C. region. Karsun teams deliver software development, cloud, and advanced analytics solutions to customers at government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration, and General Services Administration. It is an established firm, with a DCAA Approved Accounting System, CMMI Level 5 – DEV appraisal, and AWS Government Competency as well as ISO 9001, ISO 20000 and ISO 27001 certifications. Information on employment opportunities is available at karsun-llc.com/careers.