Doug Cossa, chief information officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency, revealed that the agency is leading an effort to build a simplified but secure digital network to facilitate the sharing of top-secret information with foreign intelligence authorities, Government Executive reported Thursday.
In his keynote speech at the Department of Defense Intelligence Information System Worldwide Conference, Cossa discussed ongoing collaborations with other relevant agencies to update and implement IT systems to achieve the so-called capability delivery pipeline.
“It has become commonplace where we develop everything in a no-foreign environment, and that model needs to flip,” Cossa said. “The capability delivery pipeline that we’re developing in DIA is that one front door, that one shared environment to where we can overlay those standards for cybersecurity, for interconnectivity across agencies, across the community, across the IC and DOD and across our federal partners.”
DIA plans to modernize the top-secret Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System by securing it with zero-trust architecture and adding autonomous features. It will also expand Torch, a collaborative tool with e-mail, chat and search functions as well as data warehouses for the Five Eyes, an alliance composed of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K. and the U.S. Cossa intends to open its access to more international partners outside the group.
