DOD Sees Value in Teleworkers Accessing Classified Data
Defense IT officials see the Pentagon at a turning point when it comes to accessing classified information in settings outside of the traditional sensitive and compartmented information facilities.
“In the secret and top secret realm, we have kind of cracked how to do telework in that way,” Lauren Knausenberger, chief transformation officer at the U.S. Air Force, said during an event hosted by Nextgov in early August, according to Nextgov. “It’s just that doing that at scale … What does that scale mean? It’s not really a technical problem as much as it’s a, ‘Let’s make decisions and provision.’”
Stephen Wallace, systems innovation scientist within the Defense Information Systems Agency’s Emerging Technology Directorate, confirmed Deasy’s remarks and said that the Pentagon is conducting pilots to enable remote workers to access classified information.
“There’s generally more acceptance … of software-oriented separation,” Wallace said, also at the Nextgov event. “Those kinds of things may drive some commoditization in that space where we’re using attributes about data or people or those kinds of things to help create separation versus physically having different stacks of equipment.”
DISA had been working on a prototype classified remote Windows capability early in the pandemic, but then shifted to it being more of a widely used product, Nextgov reports.
“Since then, we’ve put a tremendous more amount of capability out there with respect to how to deal with classified missions, both on-premise and off,” Wallace said. “I’m pretty excited about where that’s gone.”
Deasy’s goal is to get the CVR environment up to Impact Level 5 by the end of 2020, “which would allow it to host the Defense Department’s most sensitive unclassified data,” Nextgov reports. “Any potential telework solutions to host data at the secret designation or above would have to meet Impact Level 6 security requirements,” the publication adds.