The U.S. Army, while not formally operating like a business, is certainly a huge operation. This month, the Army has announced that it will embrace digital transformation, releasing a digital transformation plan that aims to synchronize all of its technology and “better posture itself for multi-domain operations” according to the service’s chief information officer.
“This is a new way of doing business for the Army,” Raj Iyer said at the annual AUSA conference, which was held earlier this month. “What digital transformation is all about is us operating better with industry, leveraging commercial technologies like we never have before. This is not one where we’re going to treat as an IT project. This is about changing culture, it’s about empowering our workforce to do things differently and for us to leverage better these commercial technologies.”
The U.S. Army said it embraced this strategy after increased threats against military networks and looked to find new ways of countering said attacks, especially ones that make use of technology. “The attacks that we’re getting in the Army are changing drastically. It used to be that perimeter defence would work well for defending our systems. Now a lot of those attacks have moved up the attack surface to the application level,” said Maj. Gen. Matthew Easley, chief cybersecurity officer in the CIO’s team. “That forces us to change the way we think of cybersecurity.”
The plan seeks to implement enterprise computing in a more centralized way, a stark difference from past administrations. It comes after the recently-released unified network strategy, which aims to link the enterprise and tactical nets in an omnichannel approach.
