Navy hopes new NGEN contract will lead to domain singularity – Federal News Network

Twenty years after the Department of the Navy started to consolidate its IT networks into the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), youd think that the sea services would have come close to eliminating all of their network stovepipes by now.

If so, you would be wrong.

As of today, there are approximately 140 separate legacy and excepted networks throughout the fleet that still havent been brought under the NMCI umbrella. And even though they represent a relatively small user base, theyre basically ungoverned territory. Their continued existence makes it harder for the DON to move toward a future with universally-accepted standards, and where consuming commercial cloud services is second-nature.

Its become really unaffordable, and its a also large security burden, said Capt. Ben McNeal, the program manager for Naval Enterprise Networks. Weve been successful in the past in terms of absorbing legacy and excepted networks into NMCI, but we really want to take a leap as we move forward, much like we did on the afloat networks with the CANES program.

The Navy hopes to use the latest recompetition of its Next Generation Enterprise Network contract, known as NGEN-R, to achieve that vision, which McNeal calls domain singularity. The $7.7 billion award to Leidos is being held up for the moment by two separate bid protests.

But once those matters are resolved, the Navy wants to use the contract to help absorb its remaining one-off networks into a more manageable structure. McNeal said the ultimate goal would be to physically integrate those stragglers into NMCI, much as it already plans to do with ONE-Net, the Navys overseas network.

However, thats the sort of thing that takes a lot of time and money. So in the meantime, a single logical network that follows one set of standards may have to suffice as an interim goal.

There are going to be places where we cant roll in and converge to a single solution set, McNeal said in an interview for Federal News Networks On DoD. So we want to make sure that the logical connection allows us to have seamless data flow between those networks. Some of the concepts and solution sets within the zero trust architecture allows us to be able to have that seamless flow, such that its more of a logical than a physical connection. Policy, and how we architect those, allows for those trusts that dont exist today.

Integrating the Navys IT systems into NMCI is helpful for interoperability. But its less than ideal if NMCI itself is buried in technical debt.

And Navy officials freely acknowledge thats the case today. Aaron Weis, the Navy Departments new chief information officer, estimates NMCI is running about 15 years behind industry standards.

McNeal attributes much of the current problem to outdated requirements documents. If the network the Navys using today looks like something from 2001, thats because thats when NMCI was architected. Ever since then, its been designed mostly to connect individual bases with one another not to connect the Navy with the commercial cloud computing services it now wants to use.

The Navy has tried to address that problem too via NGEN-R.

Weve framed out a journey thats going to take us from being cloud-intolerant not able to consume cloud services at all to being cloud-tolerant, cloud-ready and ultimately, cloud-native, McNeal said. Were still just in the cloud-tolerant stage right now. As weve implemented things like Office 365, weve had to make major modifications to the network just to be able to consume those cloud based productivity services. Ultimately, when were in a cloud-native state, a new application can be consumed without issue, but were not there now.

The COVID-19 situation spotlighted that problem and potential solutions to it in spectacular fashion.

Faced with a crush of teleworkers that was exponentially larger than any of the military departments or agencies had ever anticipated, the Defense Department quickly put funding toward projects like bandwidth expansion.

In Norfolk, Va., for example the largest fleet concentration center in the world the total internet bandwidth available to Navy users was 2 gigabits per second (Gbps) before the pandemic hit. Projects to expand that capacity had been delayed for the past two years.

But armed with new funding as part of the CARES Act, the Defense Information Systems Agency managed to widen that pipeline to 44 Gbps almost overnight.

Likewise, the Defense Department quickly stood up a new service called Commercial Virtual Remote, based on Microsofts Teams platform, to let employees collaborate and communicate from home. That service has its limitations: its only authorized up to Impact Level 2, so it can only be used for the lowest levels of unclassified data.

But McNeal said its been something of a game-changer.

It provides for collaboration across the entire Department of Defense. It is the closest thing Ive seen yet to domain singularity we have all of the DoD that can consume these capabilities, theres a single tenant, and we can all collaborate together were all in it, he said during a May 12 webinar hosted by ACT-IAC . When I talk about domain singularity, this is what were trying to bring forth for other services in the same manner as DoD was able to bring forth for productivity services.

But when the Navy first implemented CVR, it was careful to warn its users not to get too used to it. Any data stored on that platform would be deleted, and the entire thing would be shut down once the pandemic was over, officials warned.

Thats partly because its a trivial matter for Navy users to connect to commercial cloud services when theyre at home, where theyre directly connected to the public internet. Once they return to their desk computers, NMCIs narrow pathways to the cloud simply wont be able to support all of those connections to a service like CVR.

Not in the near-term, at least.

All of our buildings across all of our posts, camps and stations across the Navy are based on an idea of an internal routing and switching fabric, McNeal said. So our challenge is how to upgrade the boundaries to allow for the same kind of user experience when youre external to the network. Those upgrades are underway, but the Navy cant afford to upgrade the infrastructure in each building across all 2,500 of those sites. Thats where were looking to some transformational technologies 5G for example as a mitigator of some of the cost and level of effort that would be required for some of those traditional upgrades, because that would be unaffordable.

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Navy hopes new NGEN contract will lead to domain singularity - Federal News Network