PEO EIS CIO Speaks at DoD Industry Day

Mr. Bezwada provided an overview of the current threats to the network that have informed DoD's network priorities. Chief among these is to ensure complete operational awareness across the network to identify threats and provide cyber defenses. The Joint Regional Security Stacks that are currently being fielded help achieve this vision by replacing the thousands of individual installation firewalls with a handful of robust, standard security stacks.

Mr. Bezwada also discussed the Army's network modernization efforts to increase network capacity, enhance network security, utilize cloud-based enterprise service, standardize network operations, employ application security, and leverage big data analytics. He specifically emphasized how all the efforts rely on increasing capacity. "If we take bandwidth out of the picture, then innovation is unlimited," said Mr. Bezwada.

Addressing DoD's move towards the Joint Information Environment, Mr. Bezwada reminded the audience that the department has done this before. "We've been doing this for a decade in the Pentagon where 14 services and agencies work together on a common network," said Mr. Bezwada. "The joint environment only works if all the services and agencies come together to make things happen."

Mr. Bezwada also provided insight into the Army's data strategy concept which includes moving simple user data, like Office documents and PDFs to a commercial cloud services. Currently this type of data comprising about 80 percent of the Army's total storage.

The DoD-wide event also included presentations from Mr. David Cotton, DoD Deputy CIO for Information Enterprise, and Mr. Jessie Showers, DISA's Infrastructure Executive.