THE DATA YOU NEED
Another major challenge that the Army will face in the next few years is reducing the amount of technical debt, or tech debt, incurred over the last two decades, Garciga said. Tech debt is the implied cost incurred when businesses do not fix problems that will affect them in the future—and the longer a business waits, the more costly it will be to fix. In the cybersecurity realm, tech debt can be accrued from poor cyber hygiene practices. For example, while some cybersecurity programs may have expanded, they may not have kept pace with the organizations’ operational growth investments.
“It’s definitely going to be challenged by legacy integration methodology on the data side, and legacy access control meth- odology, which is going to be kind of an Achilles heel moving forward,” Garciga said. Access control methodology is a data security process that enables orga- nizations to manage who is authorized to access corporate data and resources. Secure access control uses policies that verify users are who they claim to be and ensures appropriate control access levels are granted to users.
“I think the big piece here is how do we start looking at bringing in mitigation strategies to get at that, and as we move the enterprise toward a zero trust envi- ronment, how do we make sure that we don’t leave some of those legacy capabili- ties that we can’t modernize … and bring them forward, or at least get them to a state that is a lot more secure?”
Mitigating legacy tech debt and ensuring cloud environments are secured appropri- ately will be major focuses in the future.
“As we look at expanding into the multivendor cloud service provider environment, this becomes even more challenging in the sense of having that
60 Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2024
skill set that ubiquitously understands across the landscape—not just what the cloud service providers are delivering, but how we take their implementation from a security perspective and secure it to meet our needs,” Garciga said.
Ultimately, the OCIO will need to under- stand the enterprise across all mission areas, and how data is being accessed and used, and how to audit data at scale, he explained.
WORKING TO ZERO TRUST From the Army’s perspective, network convergence is a primary goal, Garciga said. Executing the Unified Network Plan—a framework that ensures tech- nological dominance and establishes the foundation for a multidomain opera- tions-capable force by 2028—and other
technology implementation and integra- tion projects in support of unified network operations brings the Army closer to meet- ing the pillars of zero trust, he said.
Tis will help the Army to perform defen- sive cyber operations “in a much more streamlined way across the entire network,” he explained. “I think our unified security incident event management … is going to be super, super important. Tat’s one of the more critical capabilities that we’re working on—continued expansion of the big data platform Gabriel Nimbus for the Army to support the DCO [defensive cyber operations] mission.”
Gabriel Nimbus is a system designed to store and visualize large datasets, and also link the tactical side of the enterprise network to the strategic level to aid in
HARD AT WORK
Leonel Garciga, U.S. Army chief information officer, answers questions as part of the Under Secretary of the Army’s Digital Transformation Panel on Oct. 10, at the Association of the United States Army 2023 Annual Meeting and Exposition held at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington. (Photo by Jeremy Carlin, USAASC)
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