SAN DIEGO — When the Department of the Navy’s Flank Speed platform met 151 out of 152 requirements for zero trust last fall, it was only the beginning.
Flank Speed, which is the Navy’s Office 365 platform, traffics many of the Navy’s other systems and data.
Louis Koplin, the acting program executive officer for the Navy’s Program Executive Office Digital, said the success of Flank Speed meeting the zero trust requirements opens the door wider to not only more advanced cyber capabilities, but also how they can bring other data and workloads in this architecture.
“Things that are in the Flank Speed environment obviously inherit the zero trust capability. There are a lot of things that are not in the Flank Speed environment, so now we think about what are those other environments? Are we going to mature those alongside? Are we going to reengineer them to consume some of these Flank Speed zero trust capabilities?” Koplin said last week at the West 2025 conference in San Diego, sponsored by AFCEA and U.S. Naval Institute. “It’s really just the start, but it validated the approach, the holistic systems engineering approach, our industry partnerships, our pilot to production mindset, and it’s just setting us up for even more ambitious goals in the future.”
These goals cut across the entire PEO Digital portfolio and into other PEO programs.
The organization spends about $556 million a year on different technology programs.
This includes:
- $646 million on digital workplace improvements
- $292 million to modernize its IT infrastructure
- $142 million on cyber and IT lifecycle
- $79 million on IT platforms
Each of these four broad areas carries a host of programs and new goals for 2025 and beyond.
Koplin said under the cyber and IT lifecycle portfolio, the goals include the continued implementation of zero trust and to improve operational resiliency by 15% by end of 2025.
“One of the reasons for the existence of PEO Digital is we’ve got [unclassified and classified] and higher than that on separate networks. They’re all trying to solve more or less similar problems in ways that are fairly similar. So the learning that we have, the technical solutions, the business methods, are transferable,” he said. “Oftentimes, the biggest hurdle is just the difficulty in getting to a space where you can talk about the things, but once you do, you realize that there is a lot of commonality, and as we get to more common architecture across those different security domains that creates more impetus to try and figure out multi-level security, and the ability of users and data to easily flow across those security boundaries, which is often more of a policy issue than a technical issue.”
And because cyber, for example, cuts across so many policy lines, PEO Digital is working closely with the 10th Fleet cyber operators and the Marines Corps cyber operations group on deploying tools and capabilities.
Expanding the BYOD program
Koplin said that is why a goal like improving operational resiliency is about ensuring sailors, Marines and others have the right capabilities at the right time.
“There might be a physical infrastructure failure, there might be a service outage, the firewall might get angry, the API might go down and there might be a business issue, like licensing so there are a lot of ways the weakest link can collapse and suddenly you’ve got a major outage. We’re trying to really increase our thinking about that kill chain and that end result,” he said. “How do we foster those site reliability engineering mindsets to think about all the ways up to the point of consumption that we ensure with a high degree of availability, not just for the general user, but for our four stars that have certain expectations? We have to make sure that we meet their needs.”
Koplin added this means improving not only the resilience of their networks and systems, but things like their application programming interface (API) marketplace, enhancing their help desks and even modernizing the non-IT infrastructure of their data centers like heating and cooling systems.
The zero trust success and progress also has enabled the Navy to expand its goal around bring your own approved device. PEO Digital is looking to expand to about 150,000 users from 15,000 users by the end of 2025.
Koplin said it’s clear that the demand for BYOAD is clear and the technology is proven.
“We like to say that scale is earned. We had to earn that scale with Flank Speed and then the Nautilus mobile solution. Every time we do this, we’re trying to deliver capability early and often in a testable way. So then someone at NSA or whomever, can come in and bang on it, and either they prove that’s working, or they say that’s mostly working and we need to resolve these things. Then we can work with our industry partners, in this case Microsoft, and they make some engineering changes, and we rinse and repeat,” he said. “We’ve been systematically eliminating any areas of concern or providing suitable mitigations. Right now, we’re at a policy stage, working with DoD CIO to make sure that we’re scaling in time with that and making sure that we don’t leave anything behind. I don’t think there are really any blockers. As long as we continue on this path, we’ve gone from about 1,000 to 5,000 to 15,000 and Army and Air Force are there with us. So it’s really all DoD sharing that information. Everyone’s pretty excited about it, and it’s just a great capability.”
Taking Flank Speed to sea
Koplin added that the definition of approved devices are specific to Apple or Android, but those that can support necessary security features, which tends to eliminate some older phones.
“We do try and make sure people know which brands and which models are currently supported. So it’s more just setting user expectations that there are going to be a lot of phones that can be supported, but not every phone is going to be supported,” he said.
Two other goals that zero trust helped enable is scaling the Navy’s Neptune cloud management office platform to modernize and migrate 45 applications by the of the fiscal year and deploying Flank Speed at the edge, now called Flank Speed wireless.
The Navy is able to take Flank Speed to ships as a “deployable package” of software, using a hyper-converged infrastructure through Azure hubs.
“That’s been very successful in the pilot phase, both ashore and afloat as a key enabler. It can satisfy a lot of different use cases. Obviously, it can offer hosting, but even in a cloud-enabled environment, it still provides a certain amount of resiliency and local caching for high intensity hubs and sites like that. And afloat what we’ve been able to do is take that and pair it with a wireless connectivity solution that rolled out a sailor edge afloat and ashore. Flank Speed Wireless is a wireless extension of that,” Koplin said. “All these things across the entire portfolio, and they’re all meant to work together to extend that zero trust environment, that really great user experience that people associate with the term Flank Speed, into those different operating environments. While those things have primarily been focused on the unclassified domain, up through CUI and some of the most stringent CUI data communities, what we’re doing now is working with this and the rest of DOD and going into the IL6 tenants.”
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