Controlled and secure collaboration with our allies is an essential element of mission success and decision dominance. Critical team members and partners often have distinct, specialized information. Which can create silos that limit effective communication and collaboration.  Velocity of accessing information from classified networks to access mission-critical resources is vital to Mission Partner Environments, Special Access Programs (SAP), unified combatant commands, and cross-agency collaboration in this new era where missions depend on the constant, on-demand movement of information/data.  Traditionally, finding a way to extend an existing network while balancing control of authorization and privileged access was costly, expensive, and slow.  In a future the Department of Defense (DoD) vision is to enable a Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) (opens a new window) strategy built upon more effective cross-domain capabilities to ensure more unified collaboration across domains, as the backbone to decision dominance capabilities. 

Recently, as a follow-up to AFCEA Rocky Mountain Cyberspace Symposium, Signal wrote an article (opens a new window) summarizing a session where U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Miles, director, C4, J6, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM); Canada’s Brig. Gen. Kyle Paul, deputy commanding general, Transformation, Space Operations Command; and U.S. Air Force Col. James Austin, deputy director, Cyber Operations, U.S. European Command (EUCOM), J63 discussed the challenges that exist when trying to setup collaboration networks with allies and partners around the globe. 

“What we don't do or can't do today in this partner environment, specifically in the Pacific, is to have targetable data. And if you can't execute targets on your network, I would argue that you are missing probably the key operational problem that we need our networking for.” - Brigadier General Mark D. Miles

Today, trusting a partner network and their ability to secure their networks and data make information sharing hard for partner and ally environments.  In the session, Gen Miles discussed how INDOPACOM has 30 partners where episodic networks must be supported for big regional exercises and then shut down. Gen. Miles also commented that building an entire network involving multiple partners is often not feasible for a single mission or operation.  He described a less than ideal scenario that commonly happens. “Human beings acting as cross-domain solutions” where there is “literally someone reading a chat and writing on another keyboard to transfer that data from one partner to the other. In 2024, that's how we do network. That is not agile. That does not allow operational flexibility to really leverage our partnerships.”

Everfox understands these ever changing environments and strives to continually update our products to meet the needs of our customers in these mission-critical spaces.

Everfox’s Innovation Team is focused on finding solutions to Cross Domain challenges like this.  While at the Rocky Mountain Cyberspace Symposium, Everfox provided training. To address how cross domain technology from Everfox is evolving to enable network owners to have tight control network access in a flexible and robust way to dramatically improve the velocity and scale at which forces can operate and enable secure collaboration. These technologies enable mission partners to increase the level of control they have over their own data and where it resides when collaborating.  These capabilities are designed to enable network owners to maintain control of authorization and privileged access from multiple networks.

Our expanded Trusted Thin Client (TTC) capabilities will provide a Multi-Enterprise Spanning Architecture (MESA) solution designed to provide additional layers of separation between network partners and sharing of spanning.  This allows rapid network deployment and flexibility of network owners to control access without extending their own network. This supports mission partners in reducing the amount of equipment that must be deployed outside of your domain to ensure safer collaboration while protecting and maintaining controlling of your network boundary.

To learn more, reach out to one of our cross domain experts. Who can assess your cross-domain collaboration challenges and help you plan a secure and Raise the Bar compliant solution to improve access to mission-critical resources from multiple partner networks.

Source(s):

Department of Defense. (2022, March). Joint All-Domain Command & Control (_JADC2). Defense.gov. https://media.defense.gov/2022/Mar/17/2002958406/-1/-1/1/SUMMARY-OF-THE-JOINT-ALL-DOMAIN-COMMAND-AND-CONTROL-STRATEGY.PDF

Underwood, K. (2024, February 21). Panel: U.S. International Partnerships are strong, ability to integrate networks is not. AFCEA International. https://www.afcea.org/signal-media/international/panel-us-international-partnerships-are-strong-ability-integrate