Cyber commander backs cloud computing expansion - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Cyber commander backs cloud computing expansion

While the top U.S. cyber commander was on Capitol Hill making the case for shifting the Defense Department to cloud computing, three companies were announcing a corporate alliance aimed at addressing the working-level security concerns that have slowed the progress of the commander’s proposal.

The timing was, said one industry official, “a pleasant coincidence.”

The shift to cloud computing would require hosting applications online and storing sensitive data at offsite computers, instead of at the agencies that generate the information and rely on it. Some experts say the change could improve security by consolidating information and applications from thousands of desktop computers to a few highly protected sites. Information security officials have been a harder sell, reportedly because of fears that the information could be vulnerable during the transit or while in storage.

Army Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency, told a House subcommittee that he believes the shift can be made safely.

Alexander said his staff went searching for the best method to “help secure the Defense Department’s networks, given the vast typology of those networks. It was our opinion that the best way to go was to a thin, cloud, virtual cloud environment, analogous to the way that Google, AT&T and others are doing it.”

He said the cloud approach might save “manpower and money,” although “that’s yet to be proven.” Alexander said the transition also could factor into the U.S. plan to boost cyber defenses. With information consolidated at fewer locations, some of the Defense Department’s IT workforce could be retrained for “full spectrum cyber capability,” he said.

Hours before Alexander’s testimony, Harris Corp.; EMC’s RSA security division; and the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company announced an agreement to work together at a digital storage facility Harris has built at an undisclosed site in Virginia. The 140,000 square foot Cyber Integration Center, which Harris plans to open in May, would house stacks of computers, called Vblocks, provided by VCE, a company formed by Cisco, EMC, and VMware. The Vblocks would store data for government customers. RSA would provide the network security software for the facility.

Harris said the center is much more than a server farm. The facility’s security and network monitoring systems would be designed to inspire trust among potential customers at the Defense Department and within civilian intelligence agencies.

“What bothers the intelligence community is that right now they don’t believe that you can guarantee the authority, trust and authentication of data in that environment,” said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, a former chief information officer for the U.S. intelligence community, and now vice president and general manager of Harris Cyber Integrated Solutions.

The companies plan to jointly market Harris’ Trusted Enterprise Cloud services, which includes a “trust scoring” system that will scan streams of data and software to ensure they haven’t been “monkeyed with,” Meyerrose said.

The centralized approach could prove to be more efficient for government agencies because a single computer stack would house data from numerous customers, an approach called multi-tenancy. “Now you’re building cyber condominiums,” said Wyatt Starnes, chief technology officer for Harris Cyber Integrated Solutions.

The key, Starnes said, will be for agencies to trust that their information can be stored securely within multi-tenant Vblocks, with separation provided by virtual walls.

To win that trust, Harris plans to apply technology developed by the 15-person Oregon company SignaCert, which Starnes founded and Harris purchased in 2010.