The Navy has spent the last several years standing up technical solutions and designating them as enterprisewide IT services intended for use across the fleet. The next step, officials say, is to extend that same approach to the endpoint devices that sailors use every day — both ashore and afloat.
In a nutshell, the goal is simplicity. The nascent effort aims to drastically reduce the number of one-off approaches that have been assembled over the years to meet individual, sometimes niche, communications requirements and deliver a “unified endpoint” enterprise service.
“We know that connectivity and capabilities can be done extremely well, and they’re done best when we have a best-of-breed way of doing it,” Justin Fanelli, the Department of the Navy’s chief technology officer, said during Federal News Network’s DoD Modernization Exchange. “What we’ve done historically is a little bit too much ‘MacGyvering’ — solving one problem for one use case — and not using enterprise services and not scaling out what works best to everyone. We want to make IT invisible and boring.”
In the end, officials think the unified endpoint effort will lead to simpler networks, better user experience and greater data accessibility — removing the need for Navy users to worry about having the right type of device to access the service they need.
Impacts on Navy program offices, PEOs
But the effort also will likely affect the program offices that build IT services for a living. Going forward, the thinking goes, many of the ingredients that go into a given Navy technology program will be provided centrally, freeing up program managers to focus on software and capability development instead of the details of the hardware and other infrastructure their systems will run on.
“Today, not only do we have to deliver business applications, we also have to deliver the underlying infrastructure and support mechanisms,” said Brandon Wehler, technical director for the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Manpower, Logistics and Business Solutions (PEO MLB). “By aligning to this enterprise service, it takes a lot of the burden off of our backs. We don’t have to do the management of devices. We don’t have to do the securing. … Once we have common platforms, security and controls across the environment, it frees up so much time for our developers to take the feedback that we get from the sailors and redeploy instantly, because we’ll have common platforms and common frameworks. We don’t have to pigeonhole development for one segment of the population opposed to another.”
And delivering more common, more device-agnostic solutions to different segments has recently become more realistic, thanks to the advent of high-speed network connectivity aboard Navy ships, even while they’re underway.
Matthew Rambo, assistant chief engineer for mission capability at the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, said the combination of improved network access and a common approach to endpoints will also lead to readiness gains.
“We feel that this approach allows us to leverage that best of breed across the PEOs. So let’s look for the best network monitoring management implementations and put that out across both our afloat units as well as our shore side. And let’s take the collective teaming from the PEOs to figure out what a world-class network monitoring management solution should be,” he said. “On the tactical side, some of the bandwidth improvements that have been occurring with emerging satellite capabilities and the additional terminals that we’ve installed also opens the door for better telemetry, so we have more throughput to be able to send information back and forth. That really supports our need to get after really good fleet readiness, better visibility of the systems out on the platforms, as well as teaming with the platforms to make sure that their systems are up running and supporting the warfighter mission.”
Echoes of NMCI
As part of the initiative, led by the Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services (PEO Digital), the Navy plans to centralize the procurement, distribution and maintenance of its end-user devices, along with management of those devices. Application management, vetting and hosting will be centralized too.
That push toward more centralization has echoes of the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet, a much earlier effort to rationalize the service’s IT footprint through a single contract first awarded in 2000. That work, initially outsourced, was later brought back inside the government under the Next-Generation Enterprise Network (NGEN) contract.
But Fanelli said the new approach is different, particularly in the sense that the solutions the Navy determines to be best-of-breed will continue to evolve.
“In the past, it’s been about activities. Those are inputs. We are now more focused on outcomes than we’ve ever been before,” he said. “Everyone thinks they’re best of breed, but it turns out there’s only one. It was nice to throw one contract at one problem, but execution matters a whole hell of a lot. When we’re talking about fixed and mobile devices, one might perform much better than another. We are looking for that, and then as we solve each of those layered problems, the friction or the success compounds.”
Previous Navy enterprise service successes
And the Navy has seen recent successes in implementing modern enterprise services that show it can drastically simplify its IT footprint. One example is Naval Identity Services, the program to replace myriad purpose-built identity management solutions across the fleet with a single, centrally managed one.
“Now, we have a precedent, right? We’ve said Naval Identity Services is what everyone should use,” Fanelli said. “By doing this as an enterprise function, we can get rid of a thousand different implementations of identity, and while you get rid of those, you actually both improve your cybersecurity and your performance. And the zero trust implementation that we have within Flank Speed, we are saying, ‘Here is something that you don’t have to go outsource or rig up.’ So you’re starting on third base — or third and a half base for most of these things. That just takes the load off of other people and allows them to advance. … We will pick the best-of-breed piece of equipment. And if you say, ‘I really like this other device,’ well, maybe we should think about that for the enterprise. But people shouldn’t have 37 different devices. The tail on that is really tricky, and it turns out the utility without maintenance probably isn’t there.”
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