The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) is calling on industry to provide insight into commercial data-mesh capabilities to underpin the U.S. military’s future warfighting network.
A recent request for information (RFI) posted to the CDAO’s Tradewinds website, asks industry for information on the current state of commercial data-mesh capabilities to inform the DoD’s Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) data integration layer concept, governance, and technical capabilities.
The CDAO – tasked with developing a data integration layer – considers a data mesh, implemented with a zero trust cybersecurity model, as a potential implementation of the CJADC2 data target architecture.
“To inform possible future acquisitions and improve our operational advantage, the Department seeks information related to technologies designed to improve data visibility, simplify data connections, and automate data access for legacy and new globally distributed warfighting systems supported by the [data integration layer],” the RFI states.
The CDAO leads the DoD’s Data Strategy and enables the DoD’s CJADC2 vision by delivering information advantage at the speed of relevance. The office intends to develop and acquire services and technologies to support this mission within the required data volumes, types, and sources under operational conditions.
“Ancillary services, such as data management tools for the operation of resilient data mesh services, data ingest and curation, and source to endpoint security, will be considered essential,” the RFI notes. “The capabilities would span all operational areas of interest and provide globally relevant common data services.”
Specifically, the CDAO is asking industry for information about how their data-mesh capabilities can work across multiple classification levels and security domains; enable “fault-tolerant” software architectures; be synchronized between cloud regions, cloud geographies, cloud providers, and on-prem resources in both connected and denied, disconnected, intermittent or limited environments; and enable the transmission of high-priority data ahead of lower-priority data.
Industry responses are due Nov. 28.
