As one might expect, the Department of Defense is continually modernizing to meet the needs of the warfighter. Modernization in a DoD context involves leveraging new technical capabilities, achieving enhanced operations, and functioning more efficiently as an agency.
Strategies aimed at achieving these goals are directed from the center and include policy, standards, and guidance, yet they are executed in a distributed fashion across agencies and subagencies. As each service branch builds its own incremental components, an unintentional result is the creation of siloed implementations. We’re seeing it today across everything from cloud to cyber and zero trust.
Dan Schaaf, GDIT’s Senior Solutions Director and Army Sector CTO recently made the case for establishing an interoperable, zero trust foundation for JADC2, the Joint All-Domain Command and Control initiative, which involves connecting all sensors from across all branches of the military into a single network.
Schaaf talked about the risk of relying on separate and incompatible information networks, and pointed to three areas of opportunity that mission partners like GDIT can help solve: First, navigating the many zero trust products and capabilities on the market; second, integrating with existing capabilities and investments; and third, establishing an enterprise foundation that includes a cloud instantiation that can house and federate a set of required core capabilities.
To that end, Jim Matney, Vice President and General Manager of the DISA and Enterprise Services Sector for GDIT’s Defense Division, recently explained the progress made in recent years toward cloud adoption more broadly at the DoD and the challenges it has faced along the way.
“It’s more than just migrating the application into the cloud. Your infrastructure must have the ability to enable users to access and leverage those applications.”
At GDIT, in our experience working across DoD, we see a real need within JADC2 for an enterprise cloud that can host the same innovative capabilities that leading-edge companies host in the commercial cloud today. milCloud® 2.0 sets the stage for JADC2 and these needs, including a cloud located securely on DISA’s premises and inside DOD’s information networks with FedRAMP High certification. It also meets DOD Impact Level 5 security ratings (soon to be IL-6 certified), and is readily accessible by all DOD components and authorized DOD partners.
Together, zero trust and cloud are enabling technologies that give DoD an enhanced ability to protect any resource, anywhere and at any time. And just as importantly, they will accelerate warfighter capabilities by ensuring data from sensors, users and applications operating on and across JADC2 can be trusted and be used more universally. As DoD leaders have acknowledged, future conflicts will require future leaders to make decisions within minutes, or even seconds. The JADC2 concept is integral to delivering that critical ability.
