Rear Adm. David Lewis, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command chief, has said SPAWAR’s fiscal 2017 strategic plan has five areas of focus and one of those is to accelerate and streamline delivery of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms.

Lewis told C4ISRNET reporter Mark Pomerleau in an interview published Tuesday that his command has started to push modernization work out of the Chief of Naval Operations availabilities and those projects include updates to the Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services system and Operations Rolling Tide-related upgrades.

He said SPAWAR consolidated 33 data centers in 2016 and plans to move the Navy to the cloud with a plan to release the Next Generation Enterprise Networks recompete contract in 2018 as part of the strategic plan’s information technology service delivery objective.

The command also has started to implement the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s standards and risk management framework in an effort to carry out the plan’s “cyber technical leadership” objective, Lewis noted.

Other areas of focus that Lewis discussed include efforts to reduce operational costs and address issues with the command’s support contracting process.

An instrument aboard a spacecraft that works to collect data on the Earth’s radiation budget and the upper atmosphere’s dynamics marked 15 years in orbit on Jan. 22.

Scientists and officials from NASA and Hampton University gathered Jan. 31 at Langley Research Center in Virginia to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry instrument on the Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere, Energetics and Dynamics spacecraft, NASA said Tuesday.

Langley and Hampton University oversee SABER, one of the four instruments on the TIMED space vehicle and built by Utah State University’s space dynamics laboratory.

“Fifteen years of SABER data has deepened our knowledge of the planet’s radiation budget — the balance between Earth’s incoming and outgoing energy,” Clayton Turner, NASA Langley’s deputy director, said at the event.

The SABER instrument has collected measurements of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere/ionosphere region and gathered data on the upper atmosphere’s carbon dioxide and nitric oxide emissions.

James Russell, SABER principal investigator and co-director of Hampton University’s center for atmospheric sciences, said the instrument has helped provide data on changes in water, carbon dioxide and other gases as well as the “coupling of high and low atmosphere.”

Other speakers at the event include Joann Haysbert, chancellor and provost of Hampton University; Dave Grant, TIMED project manager from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory; Marty Mlynczak, SABER associate principal investigator and senior research scientist at NASA Langley; and Peg Luce, deputy director of NASA’s heliophysics division.

The U.S. Army has recorded a 38 percent reduction in the number of enterprise data centers as the military branch works to achieve its goal of 10 data repositories by 2025.

The service branch said Monday it has identified 1,157 data centers that are subject to closures as part of its plan to consolidate the facilities and has already closed 344 or 37 percent of 927 “non-tiered data centers.”

The Army’s office of the chief information officer/G-6 said in a Feb. 6 report that the service branch has shut down 41 percent or 94 out of 230 “tiered data centers,” a figure that exceeds the Office of Management and Budget’s reduction requirement of 25 percent.

Gary Wang, deputy CIO/G6, said the Army plans to operate four data centers at several military bases in Alabama, Kentucky, Colorado and North Carolina and run the other six facilities outside the continental U.S. by 2025.

The service branch has achieved at least $56 million in cost savings, decommissioned 2,848 servers and reduced floor space for such servers by approximately 154,000 feet through its data center consolidation effort, according to the report.

Wang said the Army also plans to reduce the number of its enterprise applications in areas such as engineering, human resources, logistics and finances through “application rationalization” and aims to run applications and other computing operations on commercial cloud services.

NASA‘s inspector general has called on the space agency to establish a framework to coordinate physical and cyber efforts.

The space agency’s use of information technology equipment to control physical processes makes operational technology systems vulnerable to security challenges such as malicious hacking, NASA’s IG said in a report published Wednesday.

The report noted NASA has yet to define operational technology, create a centralized inventory of OT systems and establish a standard protocol to secure systems that contain OT components.

NASA should identify systems that incorporate OT components since the application of traditional IT security measures to OT systems may cause malfunction, the IG said.

The report found that an IT security patch led to a fire in an engineering oven that destroyed spacecraft hardware.

Auditors said NASA lacks sufficient awareness of OT systems; training focused on OT equipment protection; and policies that distinguish OT from IT systems.

The agency has yet to establish an integrated risk management approach for physical and cyber security assets which has led to duplicate efforts and gaps in security planning and risk remediation.

The report stated that insufficient guidance, oversight, funds and record keeping limits visibility and insight into NASA’s infrastructure protection measures and impedes the agency’s capacity to secure assets.

NASA IG recommended the agency to create a standardized process to assess cyber and physical assets; include appropriate personnel in the reviews of critical infrastructure assets; and form security policy and procedures for OT protection.

The IG also called on NASA to establish an integrated cyber and physical risk management committee or oversight body to support NASA’s efforts to protect OT systems.

The U.S. Army has introduced a career management initiative that seeks to integrate civilians with the service branch’s cyber enterprise.

The service branch’s cyber leaders launched the program in January after the Army initiated efforts to grow the cyber force within the military, the Army said Friday.

The Army also plans to study the feasibility of a direct commissioning pilot program to recruit civilians for cyber units.

The Defense Department “has now asked us to do a pilot program by service… looking at skill sets that we can bring on direct commissioning into the cyber career field,” said Brig. Gen. Patricia Frost, director of cyber for the Army’s G-3/5/7.

All military services are asked to submit their findings to DoD by 2020, according to the report.

Frost noted that the service branch needs to conduct more discussion on what type of skills sets the pilot program should aim at, the report added.