It started as a tech refresh project, but now it's a Defense Department-wide approach to network security: the Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) program is up and running, and it continues to grow.
As the Army and Air Force migrate network operations to four of the initial stateside JRSS locations at operational capacity — Joint Base San Antonio, Texas; Oklahoma City; Montgomery, Alabama; and Fort Bragg, North Carolina — DoD's broader Joint Information Environment (JIE) also continues to take shape. It's all part of a militarywide transition to an enterprise-centered approach to IT operations and cybersecurity that empowers decision-makers down the chain of command.
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One of the organizations helping to lead the transition is the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), where officials are coordinating the rollout of technology and policies that underpin JRSS and JIE. Behind the acronyms, marquee programs and efforts, officials are coordinating on the ground to deliver on promises of savings, efficiencies and effectiveness.
"The overall goal is to improve security, situational awareness and collaboration across the department," said Col Scott Jackson, chief of DISA's JIE solutions division. "We're definitely seeing best practices across the services, and we definitely want to be able to bring in those services' and agencies' lessons learned."
Jackson noted that some key challenges include "getting the stacks operational [on schedule], and the migration is probably the biggest concern [there]."
"We need to get better at getting migrations onto the stack without breaking anything," he said. "Testing is going well, but migration is a very deliberate process to make sure there are no negative effects."
The Army has already migrated several of their communities of interest to stacks at Joint Base San Antonio, with users there and at Fort Hood well into using JRSS. The Air Force is in the process of moving over to JRSS, which means shutting down the internal gateways they previously used in favor of the joint approach.
With the end of fiscal 2015, DISA finished up acquisitions for the remaining equipment for all of the contiguous U.S. locations, paving the way for those to become operational this fiscal year.
"That brings up the stacks already built and installed to the level the Army and Air Force can migrate into," Jackson said. "There are a few extra capabilities that the Air Force had in their gateways, and now they can decommission their gateways and get into JRSS. The first four sites' hardware has arrived, the equipment has been racked up, and now we're working on the time between acceptance testing and migration of units to activate the capabilities."
There are five more migrations planned by March, with particular emphasis currently on streamlining the migration process to make it faster and easier to transition users to JRSS from their legacy systems.
"The last six months have been about finding ways to go in, take the unit, and when we cut them over from legacy equipment to JRSS, that's the migration effort," Jackson said. "And it's been pretty detailed because the last thing we want to do is break any capability or take away something we already had. So there's been tremendous effort to do a lot of discovery, [identifying] a lot of sensors on existing networks to make sure now every connection and every system is running, so when we migrate there are no hiccups."
"We've been finding better tools and processes … to do that faster, to get to where we're doing migration as fast as possible," Jackson continued. "The sooner they get on JRSS, the sooner they start saving."
While the Army and Air Force are all-in on JRSS, the Navy still is determining which, if any, of its networks may be transitioned to JRSS. So far, the Navy has provided a list of accepted networks, or those that haven't already been migrated to the Navy's own upgraded stacks and, therefore, could potentially be moved to JRSS.
"So that's the negotiations starting now, which networks can we do first and when can we get Navy coordination on migration teams, getting them trained up," Jackson said. "We've sent some Navy teams to JRSS training, and once we know that first network and we know which stack it's going to migrate to, we can better plan that out."
