DISA awards Booz Allen $6.8M Thunderdome prototype contract

The Defense Information Systems Agency has awarded a $6.8 million contract to Booz Allen Hamilton to build a Thunderdome zero-trust environment prototype, the agency announced in a news release today.

The award kicks off a six-month program phase in which officials hope to produce a working prototype as part of a push to inform the scalability of the effort across the Defense Department, DISA said.

Additionally, the agency said it hopes the work on Thunderdome will result in an “overall implementation strategy” to move from the current cybersecurity infrastructure to an enterprise-wide option.

Calling the move toward prototyping Thunderdome “a substantial shift to a next-generation cybersecurity and network architecture for DOD,” Chris Barnhurst, DISA’s deputy director, said in the release the work “fundamentally changes our classic network-centric, defense-in-depth security model to one centered on the protection of data.”

Predating the move is the DOD’s decision last year to phase out the Joint Regional Security Stacks, a decade-long effort to consolidate network security centers across the military, pulling together and centralizing equipment like firewalls, network routers and switches into regional architectures. DISA has spent recent years looking for industry feedback on the “next generation JRSS.”