Jane Rathbun, acting chief information officer (CIO) at the Department of Navy, hailed the service branch’s progress toward zero trust security principles through its Flank Speed technology effort during an Oct. 13 address at AFCEA NOVA’s Naval IT event coinciding with the 248th anniversary of the U.S. Navy’s founding.
Flank Speed is the Navy’s single enterprise solution for daily work that aims to provide a secure environment for collaboration, cloud storage for files and documents, and Microsoft Office 365 (M365) productivity tools.
“We have successfully transitioned 530,000 users on the Navy side and the Marine Corps has done the same, for a total of 800,000 personnel working on a common suite of tools,” she said. “That was just the beginning getting that platform set up being zero trust compliant. We call it Flank Speed on the Navy side,” said Rathbun.
“That zero trust platform opens up a lot of doors for us and how we can innovate and deliver capability to our sailors, Marines, and civilian contractors,” the acting CIO said.
Rathbun added that adopting the Flank Speed tenets has allowed the service branch to pivot to an enterprise service model and speedily bring IT capabilities to its military community.
Although the Navy has achieved a lot in the cybersecurity and IT arenas, Rathbun said there are still areas where the service branch has more to do.
“Data maneuverability is going to be our focus going forward,” she said, adding, “we need to explore how we can leverage AI. We are not going to move all our data to the tactical edge, that’s not smart” or “useful for the warfighter.”
“We need to learn to build and train models and be able to take those trained models, move them to the tactical edge, combine them with sensor data coming off of our platforms, and give our sailors and Marines real-time decisions to [give them the] advantage with the latest information,” she said.
Rathbun also made it clear that the Navy must leverage 5G wireless capabilities to the fullest extent. “5G is another area that we have to figure out how to leverage and utilize, and when we do that it changes how we will actually deliver networking capabilities to our sailors wherever they are. Again, that’s a cultural shift for us,” she said.
