The report, “Navigating the Intelligence Community IT Roadmap,” analyzes key challenges facing the IC and outlines how existing and tested technology capabilities can help IC components gain a strategic advantage over adversaries.

The report’s timely release aligns with the IC’s five-year IT roadmap, which seeks to advance intelligence operations by promoting seamless collaboration, enhanced data sharing and management and the ability to deploy the newest tech innovations rapidly.

The report highlights a variety of currently available technical capabilities developed by GDIT as part of its long-standing work to support the U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, including:

• DeepSky — a private, multi-cloud, on-prem data center environment developed and maintained by GDIT that facilitates the testing of emerging technology and security capabilities from multiple providers in collaboration with government agencies and their partners. “It’s really difficult to ingest massive amounts of data from a bunch of tools and make it usable for an engineer, an analyst or an executive. So DeepSky helps make those tools work together,” says Ryan Deslauriers, director of cybersecurity at GDIT.

• Mission Partner Environments — a new generation of interoperable networking and data exchange environments. Originally designed to allow military units to exchange data with specific partners, these expanded information-sharing environments enable the selective yet secure sharing of sensitive and classified information with trusted military and coalition partners. MPEs make it possible to take a “full report, break out what can and can’t be released, and push it to the appropriate network virtually and automatically so that information gets to relevant users where they are in a timely fashion,” explains Jennifer Krischer, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who now serves as vice president for defense intelligence at GDIT.

• Raven — a mobile command center tech suite developed by GDIT that fits in the back of a truck. It extends and deploys the data mesh concept to mobile environments. It can be utilized for disaster relief, special forces operations, or disconnected environments, enabling operators to collect and disseminate data from the tactical edge directly to users on the ground and back to the enterprise. Raven is an example of how GDIT “enables teams to conduct their mission without having to develop, build, maintain, and operate the services internally,” notes Nicholas Townsend, senior director at GDIT.

• Federated Data Fabric — creates a unified data environment through a centralized service platform designed to streamline data curation, management, and dissemination and enable seamless access to data independent of its source or security level. It allows users on the network’s edge to discover, request, publish and subscribe to information within a federated network environment.

Workforce commitment

The report also highlights GDIT’s distinctive approach to hiring and training professionals with extensive defense, IC, and technical experience who uniquely understand the needs of the government’s mission.

“Our workforce two to five years from now will need to be different from what it is today and prepared to take advantage of new technology,” notes Chaz Mason, mission engineering and delivery lead at GDIT. Recognizing this, GDIT doubled its investment in tuition and technical training programs in 2023. More than 20,000 employees have taken at least one of our cyber, AI, and cloud upskilling programs, he said.

GDIT’s staff currently numbers 30,000 professionals supporting customers in over 400 locations across 30 countries; 25%+ of the workforce are veterans.

Read more about how GDIT’s vendor-agnostic technology and decades of government customer experience can help achieve the Intelligence Community’s data-sharing vision.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for FedScoop and DefenseScoop and sponsored by GDIT.

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Central to those efforts is the renewed vision for creating interoperable “Mission Partner Environments” (MPEs), asserts a new Scoop News Group report sponsored by GDIT. MPEs will allow the military and its trusted partners to communicate and share sensitive information securely and in real-time with allied partners.

MPEs represent a logical extension of the DOD’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) strategy to federate, jointly access and act upon relevant situational data. However, according to the report, that strategy is also fueling a new commitment to integrate mission and coalition partners into evolving technical standards, capabilities and policies — and toward a global IT environment rather than a U.S.-centric one.

The conflicts and humanitarian crises in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere across the globe have added new urgency to the need for near real-time information exchange across multiple domains. They have also heightened how modern warfare has taken on new dimensions in contrast to previous conflicts, according to the report, including:

• Hybrid Warfare Challenges — Conventional military tactics are being fused with cyber and information warfare. This blending of domains necessitates seamless data sharing to effectively counter and respond to such multifaceted threats.
• Information Warfare and Disinformation — Adversaries in the Ukraine conflict extensively employed disinformation campaigns to shape perceptions and destabilize regions. Interoperable systems enable partner nations to collectively analyze and counter such narratives, ensuring a more comprehensive and coordinated response.
• Dynamic Battlefield Tactics — The conflict has underscored the rapid evolution of the battlefield, where situational awareness is paramount. Interoperability enables partners to share real-time intelligence, adjust strategies and respond swiftly.
• Civil-Military Coordination — The Ukraine conflict has also highlighted the importance of integrating civilian and military efforts in a comprehensive approach. Interoperable systems facilitate coordination among various agencies, ensuring a more cohesive and effective response.

While the concept of MPEs is hardly new, what’s changing is the need to collapse and improve the speed and effectiveness of an expanding array of networks to share information securely with coalition partners, says Eric Tapp, a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Army, and now MPE lead at GDIT.

“MPEs are moving from this massive point-to-point connection on a standalone network to the point where eventually all warfighters working in NATO or working in a coalition environment will be able to communicate effectively and share data,” he explains in the report. What’s missing, he contends, “is the operational art and the art of deployment.” 

Tapp, who led MPE development at USCENTCOM before retiring from the Army, highlights “the path to modern MPEs” in the report, the critical need for data-centricity and why MPEs must be transport agnostic if they are to fulfill the vision for real-time data sharing with coalition partners.

Read the full report on developing modern ‘Mission Partner Environments” and how GDIT is helping enhance interoperability with global partners.

This article was produced by Scoop News Group for DefenseScoop and FedScoop and sponsored by GDIT.

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