The Department of Defense is currently striving to combine its information technology systems through an enterprise architecture, but as the project advances, so does the cybersecurity risk.
Virtualization is helping mitigate some of that risk, said Col. Scott Jackson, chief of the joint Information environment solutions division of the Defense Information Systems Agency, speaking May 26 at the C4ISR & Networks Conference.
See full coverage of the C4ISR & Networks conference here.
“To try and avoid that [risk], what we’ve tried to do is—I talked about the virtual substantiations of each of the security zones at each base as [virtual routing and forwarding]—where Fort Hood’s normal base population may have these web content filter settings, but the health community maybe has a different set because they want to do some things with Johns Hopkins University,” he said.
“So we’ve definitely tried to slice-and-dice in virtual space back to the individual base post so that we don’t get that total flattening down of the one set of rules.”
Jackson added that the addition of out-of-band networks had also provided JRSS the ability to provide visibility of its connections, but the other battle is adoption.
“It’s the trust that’s the challenge,” he said. “Actually getting folks onto the system, using it, exercising it, coming to the lab. Folks who have not migrated are a little hesitant to get down to the basics of that migration.”
