US Navy’s Cyber and IT Strategy Revealed

US Navy’s Cyber and IT Strategy Revealed

cyber

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The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) rolled out its 2017 strategy. Emphasizing high technology and IT delivery, cyber operations, and optimization of staff and resources, the strategy underscores ongoing evolution at the command and across the Navy.

Rear Adm. David Lewis, commander of SPAWAR, provided members of industry a peek inside the recently rolled out strategy at a conference adding a few of his own thoughts, as reported by c4isrnet.com.

To achieve SPAWAR’s vision, which aims “to rapidly deliver cyber warfighting capability from seabed to space,” the strategy lists five guiding end states. These include accelerating and streamlining delivery, enabling modern IT service delivery, owning cyber

technical leadership, reducing the cost of operations and optimizing organization and workforce.

One of the common themes throughout the strategy builds on last year’s progress, and tracks with a growing problem in the IT world and the Navy — developing and streamlining easy upgrades to installations and ships with software and hardware solutions.

In terms of accelerating and streamlining delivery, the twofold approach focuses on driving down costs and decreasing the time to deploy new tools to the fleet.

The Navy, strained under longer deployments due to rising conflicts around the world, has to some degree struggled to keep up with IT installations and maintenance.

Additional IT priorities include moving the Navy to a more mobility-friendly posture and embracing commercial cloud. Developing enterprise mobile application and data management solutions — with the goal of converging common, enterprisewide solutions down the road — along with expanding the Navy’s mobile application environment are two overarching plans the strategy identifies in this space for 2017.

In terms of cloud, SPAWAR acknowledges that one of the most significant IT trends in the commercial world is the shift in its purchase and delivery, offering scaling to meet challenges – rather than supporting an extensive IT asset inventory. The three overarching priorities planned in the way of cloud for 2017 listed are evaluating enterprise cloud productivity services for Navy implementation, continuing to establish required government infrastructure to expand commercial cloud adoption, and transitioning existing systems and preparing new systems for cloud environments.

Better cyber security and threat detection will involve support tools to monitor and analyze the network to provide enterprise-level situational awareness; align with the RMF to incorporate continuous monitoring to identify cybersecurity events and verify the effectiveness of protective measures; and test and certify cyber processes that will validate end-to-end cyber mission effectiveness.

“Our maneuver operations occur in the cyber battlespace [comprising] networked systems and the electromagnetic spectrum. SPAWAR must ensure the Navy maintains its cyber advantage by providing capability to observe activity across all domains, including the electromagnetic and information environments. SPAWAR maintains the full spectrum of connectivity required for modern naval warfare,” the strategy noted.