The Defense Department (DOD) Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3) is moving to implement a data mesh fabric to bring more structure to its growing data environment and improve decision-making speed, an official said Thursday.
Under the Trump administration, the DOD was rebranded as the War Department.
Speaking during a recent episode of Federal News Network’s ‘Ask the CIO’ webinar series, Kajal Pal, DC3’s division chief for Architecture Management of Data and Enterprise, said the effort aims to create a flexible ecosystem where agencies and vendors can generate and use data on demand.
“We are making sure that our vendors or our other agencies using the metadata, they can create their own products and can generate the data on demand,” Pal said. “So, we are creating the ecosystem for our supply chain and for other agencies to collect, analyze, and make an intelligent decision at the right time.”
Pal said a key challenge is ensuring that data systems remain synchronized with their original sources. Without proper integration into deployment pipelines, systems such as data fabrics or meshes can quickly become outdated and unreliable, he explained.
Pal said dynamic tagging will allow analysts to extract more insight from the data lake, including details about software code, potential risks tied to deployments, and product characteristics.
The initiative also aims to better integrate internal cyber data with business data from financial management and human resources systems. According to Pal, combining these data sources will enable more real-time cybersecurity decisions, reflecting their increasing interdependence.
Like many organizations, DC3 faces a surge in data volume, which complicates cyber defense efforts. Pal said the risk of missing critical information grows as more data flows in daily, particularly as the agency expands its cyber-information sharing partnerships with private-sector firms.
The planned data fabric will include metadata tagging to pull in information from software development efforts and partner contributions. DC3 is also adopting a software factory model, joining other DOD agencies seeking to better manage and secure technology systems.
“If we properly implemented this software factory and our dynamic data timing through this process, I think we will cut down almost 30 to 40% operational overhead, manpower,” Pal said.
DC3 already collaborates with software factories operated by the Air Force and the intelligence community to identify cyber risks. Pal shared that DC3 is in the process of building its own software factory, which the agency plans to integrate with the federated data fabric across classified and unclassified environments.