Data-centric cybersecurity and automated classification can help the U.S. military achieve battlespace dominance due to their ability to protect information regardless of its location or users, Shannon Vaughn, general manager of Virtru Federal and U.S. Army Reserve officer, wrote in an article in C4ISRNET.
In his opinion piece, Vaughn talks about the emergence of data dominance as one of the most critical elements of military missions, and how non-conventional cyber defense is the ideal approach moving forward.
To implement a data-centric approach, the military must classify and tag their information according to level of sensitivity. Effective tagging and classification can be leveraged by mission teams to control the access and use of their information, giving them built-in security controls instead of device-based protection, according to Vaughn.
Mission teams should utilize a combination of attribute-based access control, or ABAC, and automated classification and tagging to streamline and expedite the process. Vaughn recommended ABAC that is enabled by the Trust Data Format standard, which features military-grade encryption and is approved by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
