Here is an inexpensive way to bolster the security and affordability of defense networks.
As Washington struggles to cope with the latest “unprecedented” penetration of sensitive networks, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the federal government’s cyber problems are at least partly self-inflicted. Despite pouring billions of dollars into cybersecurity and talking incessantly about the challenge, the government’s adoption of secure, resilient information systems is quite uneven. The Pentagon is a case in point, because it outspends every other federal department on computer and data systems, and yet operates an information architecture with more seams than the First Lady’s wedding dress. Seams in this instance means gaps that can be exploited by foreign operatives to unravel system security or functionality. In 2018 the defense department published a strategy calling for migration of the current, balkanized infrastructure to a cloud system in which data could be handled more flexibly and securely. This was not a conceptual breakthrough. The commercial sector has been shifting to cloud computing since Amazon AMZN created its web services unit in 2006. The basic idea is to rely on third-party providers to supply on-demand information services rather than maintaining in-house data centers that often can’t keep up with the latest standards in productivity and protection. So here we are, two years later, and where does the Pentagon stand? Its premier cloud initiative, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (or JEDI) program has been tied up in legal wrangling for over a year. Meanwhile, various defense organizations are operating, according to Sydney Freedberg of Breaking Defense, over 500 separate cloud systems. This is not the way cloud computing is supposed to work. At least, not in the Pentagon’s plan.
