The Navy is beginning a pilot program in the spring aimed at modernizing its afloat network architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201ccompile-to-combat in 24 hours\u201d pilot aims to separate presentation, application and data layers, Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett, director of the Navy Cyber Security Division, said during a Feb. 8 presentation at the West 2018 conference in San Diego, California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Barrett said the service wants to prevent the need to reach back to servers ashore to gain access to personnel databases or even sensor data that might be operationally relevant or critical for commanders. The vision, using a network architecture template that was created 17 years ago, is for a mini data cloud on that ship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On a ship, she said, instead of having a specific monolithic application that just provides the navigation capability, an application logic could be self learning telling commanders what they need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt can use AI to help me to say this and this and this is happening, I\u2019m going to present this to you because I think you need it in this context\u2026Or here\u2019s some functionality I need you to see,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Additionally, they want to be able to send ship data ashore to a big commercial cloud to tie into big data analytics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe are going to be disconnected\u2026you have to say how can I make sure that commander has as much information at their finger tips even at that moment in time and how do I sustain him when he is in that environment so he can continue to operate,\u201d she told C4ISRNET following her presentation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIf you are building apps or\u2026 web pages and web portals that require everybody to reach back to your portal ashore, that\u2019s not what we\u2019re looking for in the future,\u201d she said. \u201cWe need to think about that in the context of how you\u2019re going to move forward with your applications and the capability that you deliver to the warfighters.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Barrett told C4ISRNET they\u2019re testing five applications this spring as part of the first phase of the pilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They\u2019re also conducting the pilot on a DDG and an amphibious ship because they wanted a large deck and a small ship to conduct the test with existing architecture. They\u2019ll wrap up the first phase and lessons learned by June with the next phase looking to broaden to more applications and testing on the secret network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pilot will focus on testing four specific aspects related to these applications: data standardization, the shared infrastructure, how to automate the testing to get it quickly fielded and how to use the commercial cloud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe could be totally wrong,\u201d Barrett said about their vision for this architecture. However, \u201cI suspect we\u2019re not, because industry is kind of going this way with how their doing everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If the architecture works, Barrett said the eventual goal is to make this the standard across the entire Navy. The afloat networks are the \u201cthe lowest common denominator because of bandwidth and disconnectedness,\u201d she said, and so if it works there, there\u2019s no reason it shouldn\u2019t be the standard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe want to make sure this architecture is repeatable,\u201d she said, \u201cnot a one trick pony.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI want to be able to test in the submarine environment, I want to test on LCS, I want to test on all those environments because they all need the same.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If the architecture works, the eventual goal is to make this the standard across the entire Navy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":31845,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":16,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[160,12,49,16,36],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3336],"class_list":["post-22494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-news-roundup","category-industry","category-techwatch","category-naval","category-newsletters"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"NUIMUU3HBZHRNM6KAR2FHV4MBE","arc_canonical_url":"\/show-reporter\/afcea-west\/2018\/02\/09\/navy-to-begin-afloat-network-pilot-using-mini-clouds-at-sea\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n