Lt. Col. James Bowen has reveiled the Air Force’s desire to further assert itself helping to shape the Joint Information Environment, the Pentagon’s department-wide network interoperability plan, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.Jared Serbu writes that Bowen, who heads JIE planning at the Office of the Air Force Chief Information Officer, sees the military service contributing to the still-evolving iniatitive thanks to experiences gleaned from its own network consolidation under AFNET.
“We want to be engaged at the DoD level so that the tasks and the solutions we’re being driven toward are things that we find acceptable and that meet our requirements,†Bowen told Federal News Radio.
“Our ability to shape JIE is just as important as our ability to adopt JIE,” he added.
According to the report, the Air Force has already made headway in JIE emphasis areas such as network normalization, the use of a single security architecture and data center consolidation, another artifact of the recent AFNET migration.
Lt. Col. Paul Williams, the Air Force team lead on joint regional security stacks, said the military service’s gateways under AFNET has reduced the infrastructure’s attack surface by up to 99 percent.
“We’re blocking about 9 billion events per month in terms of malicious network scans and brute force attacks that can’t come in anymore,†Williams told the radio station.
“It also got rid of noise on the inside, so that we can see and understand our network traffic better,†it added.
