WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army program office responsible for developing defensive cyber tools is beginning to field a new platform to installations.

Col. Mark Taylor, the project manager for defensive cyber operations at Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems told C4ISRNET that the new platform — called the Garrison Defensive Cyber Operations Platform — is heading to the war fighter in the next year.

A spokesperson for PEO EIS said the platform allows for integration into the global enterprise fabric, an Army enterprise computing environment, and will allow soldiers to work remotely. The Garrison effort started in early 2016, and the platform is being fielded to the Project Manager Defensive Cyber Operations' Cyber Platform and Systems office.

Also in the works at PEO EIS, which has an annual budget of $4.3 billion, are plans to stand up a new network to help cyber defenders collaborate with development teams to fix technological issues while in the field. The new network, called the Defensive Cyber Operations Development Environment Network, will be stood up in the next year, according to Lt. Col. Peter Amara, product lead for applied cyber technologies. The team is still working on the architecture of the platform.

“It is a network or an infrastructure that’s supposed to enable our deployed forces to collaborate with development teams back here and industry and academia, etc.,” Amara told C4ISRNET in an interview before the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference. “When we have teams go out on mission and they encounter issues or problems, how do they talk back to developers to ensure that we actually fix, remediate, take care of that issue immediately without them, you know, actually coming back here before that issue is corrected?”

Another project under Project Manager Defensive Cyber Operations is the Forge. It was stood up a few years ago to quicken acquisition and innovation while building a stronger relationship with industry. In its first year, the Forge downsized a defensive cyber kit from 100 pounds to a deployable platform that could fit into an airplane’s overhead bin. In the last year, the Forge delivered another dozen software prototypes, Amara said.

The Forge works closely with another little-known project manager capability, called the Armory, which serves as storage for software tools developed by the Forge. When the Forge develops patches for software products, it’s the Armory that installs them.

Date: 16-10-2020

Source: Defense News