Leo Garciga, the chief information officer (CIO) at the U.S. Army, announced on Friday that the Army plans to publish official guidance next week focused on “cross-domain solutions” (CDS) offered as a cloud-based service to transfer data more easily between networks.
Speaking at the AFCEA NOVA Army IT Day on Jan. 17, Garciga said that the document “is ready,” but is going through some “legal” hoops right now before it’s published.
“We are actively working very, very, very hard – hopefully next week it gets signed out – on CDS as a service in cloud. Super important,” Garciga said.
“I know everybody out there has asked me, I’m telling you, I’ve told the department, we’re doing this. We’re getting it done,” he added. “We know the deployment pattern, we have it in intel, [and] we’re going to do it on the Title 10 side for the Army.”
The Army published a request for information (RFI) in October related to hardware and software architecture for CDS. According to the RFI, CDS “are a key component to information dominance and warfighter operations that provide the ability to access or transfer information between different security domains.”
The RFI explains that a CDS capable of connecting to multiple security domains will allow the warfighter to transfer data during mission operations. According to the RFI, the Army set a requirement that the CDS must support up to 10 security domains.
“That will come out next week,” Garciga pledged. “We’re going to start sunsetting these cross-domain solutions across the board. We’re super excited about it. It’s going to be great for the business systems that are already in the cloud, that’s one good thing, and for those folks who’ve got warfighting capabilities in the cloud, it’s going to be great.”
“This is really kind of our march to reduce that kind of threat terrain across the Army and really manage that in a smart way, so you don’t have to go through some onerous 18-month process,” the CIO explained. “You can just say, ‘Hey, I need to hook up this to this network,’ … and we’re going to hook you up. So, we’re really excited that that’s going to come out.”
When the document is published, Garciga joked, “Any feedback is great, as long as it’s good feedback. Don’t tell me it sucks; just tell me it could be better.”
