Army having 'limited success' building resilient IT systems for cyber domain

The Army has "a long way to go" in its fight in the cyber domain, according to a service official.

"We are at war in the cyber domain as we speak every day . . . and it's a constant area we have to focus on," William Moore, assistant deputy chief of staff for the Army (G-4), said today at a conference hosted by the Professional Services Council. "We're trying to build more resilient IT systems that can deal in this environment and be protected, and we’re having limited success."

Moore said the Army is trying to create what he calls "disconnected operations," where certain critical functions can be done without an operating network. He added the service moving to a commercial cloud provides faster recovery in a "disaster-type situation."

"Just because I've lost the network, that doesn't mean tactical Army logistics is stopped in the middle of an operation," he said. "So, we're working hard in that area as well as to try to create the ability to continue to function when we lose the network as we strive to get to network backup. We're on a cloud migration . . . The question now for the Army is, which cloud? How you get there? And then how you contract for that? [It] all matters in the end when we’re trying to keep our costs down as we try to keep our readiness high."

He added the service spent over $1 million last year to hire a hacking company to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities in its network.

"We learned a lot. We found high-risk vulnerabilities that they were able to discover and exploit and frankly all of those were in the commercial software side, the baseline, not in the customization that we had done," Moore said.