Keys to Cyber: Joint Information Environment and Cyber Workforce Development
Army BG Frederick Henry, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) chief of staff and director of the Joint Information Environment (JIE) Technical Synchronization Office (JTSO), shared insights on the opportunities and challenges of building an enterprise information environment and emphasized the importance of developing a robust cyber workforce at the 4th Annual Cybersecurity Symposium, presented by the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA).
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| Army BG Frederick Henry, DISA chief of staff and director of the Joint Information Environment (JIE) Technical Synchronization Office (JTSO), addressed attendees at the 4th Annual Cybersecurity Symposium in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 22. |
Henry began by explaining DISA’s role in evolving the JIE and offered his thoughts on the technologies and innovations enabling this enterprise environment.
“One of the keys to cyber is having single security architecture,” said Henry. “[The question is,] how do we collapse many of the firewalls, etc. that we currently have in our environment today so that we can have an environment that is better optimized, easier to control, allows better configuration, reduces a lot of unnecessary infrastructure, eliminates redundancy, and improves effectiveness and efficiency so that you can have greater visibility of what’s happening in those networks?”
Henry added that network normalization of transport — the monitoring of network traffic and removal of ambiguities — is also important to evolving the JIE.
According to Henry, some consolidation may be necessary in order to garner information technology (IT) efficiencies.
“If we want to reduce overhead and costs and make IT more affordable for the department, we’re going to have to consolidate more and migrate more to the enterprise and what some would call a cloud environment,” he said.
Henry also explained that while there are going to be military service-specific capabilities —driven by unique mission requirements — the JIE hopes to identify common applications and capabilities that are being deployed across each of the military services. He cited DoD Enterprise Email as a good example of “a common capability that’s also a better product as a result of it being an enterprise solution.”
When addressing the challenges of cyber workforce development, Henry encouraged the audience to examine their own organization’s cyber workforce readiness and shared some of DISA’s progress in this area.
“This is a type of environment where your skills are perishable,” he said. “Getting people the right type of experience to develop the layered defense to counter some of the cyber threats that we see is a challenge. We have to figure out how we’re going to grow that skill. Not only do we have to recruit and train, we also have to figure out how we retain.”
“[This is] an exciting time in our department and in our nation, Henry said in closing. “Some people go through their entire careers and never have a chance to help the department fundamentally [change] how it does business.”
Posted February 27, 2013