As the Navy works to add more ships and change the fleets physical architecture, they’re also working on the fleet’s network architecture. The Navy’s “Compile to Combat in 24 hours” program is designed to get the right information to the right crewman at the right time. Doing this requires a lot of overhauls to the way the Navy treats data. Rear Adm. Danelle Barrett, cybersecurity division director & deputy CIO at the Navy, says the service’s top data priority is to standardize it across the fleet.
“Data standardization is important to get us to at least be able to interchange and have interoperability, and do a lot of things that we need specific to the military. For example, compressing data. If we can standardize on the data, we can compress it, we can secure it better, which from a cybersecurity perspective is very important to us. And we can do things like the CIO of the ship can order up what data they want,” Barrett said. “Today, they get everything globbed on the ship at once and they have to sort it out. In the future, we want the CIO of the ship to say ‘Just send me my navigation information for this area every 20 minutes, send me my intel every 15 minutes, send me changes to social security numbers from these 250 sailors on my ship every Monday at 2 in the morning.’ That kind of precision of data and how we use it will be really, really helpful to us.”
