As the Defense Department expands its embrace of cloud computing, commercial technologies (including cloud) and mobility, security remains a top-of-mind concern.
At the Defense Information Systems Agency, the sweeping Joint Regional Security Stack initiative to overhaul IT infrastructure across military bases also is serving as means for DoD to empower troops to act in cyberspace. DISA is helping to implement JRSS at dozens of sites in the U.S. and abroad, but the agency also is changing the way it trains in and conducts cyber operations, starting at Fort Meade, Maryland, where DISA, U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency all are housed.
Event: DISA Director LTG Ronnie Hawkins and DoD CIO Terry Halvorsen are among the speakers at AFCEA’s Defense Cyber Operations Symposium, set for May 5-7 in Baltimore, Maryland. Click here for details.
“When you start looking at the command and control and the capabilities that we are going to put at the combatant commander’s fingertips, not necessarily at the signal, communicator, cyber fingertips, we are getting ready to change the way we work,” DISA Director LTG Ronnie Hawkins said April 7 at the C4ISR & Networks Conference in Arlington, Virginia. “In fact within DISA, within the joint force headquarters, we are even training differently…I would tell you that we have to get it to where we treat the JRSS as a weapons system and we are operationalizing that within DISA and within the Department of Defense.”
It’s a move that comes along with the desire to cautiously embrace a wider swath of technology providers.
“We are working within DoD to get better at our partnership opportunities,” said DoDo CIO Terry Halvorsen, also at the conference. “It has to be a supervised effort. It does need to be [all of] DoD and we have to get more enterprise-like in our behavior. And we are working toward that. There is some cultural change [and] there is some policy change that has to happen.”
