DOD Aggressively Rolls Out Telework Tools
In the early days of the pandemic, DOD agencies often found that there wasn’t enough technology to support the demands for telework. “There weren’t enough audio bridges or VPN clients,” Galbraith says. “We didn’t have enough bandwidth capacity.”
Mark Weatherford, chief strategy officer for the nonprofit National Cybersecurity Center and the Department of Homeland Security’s first deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity during the Obama administration, says that every federal organization struggled with giving so many people secure remote access overnight.
For government agencies that didn’t have laptops or remote capabilities available for everyone, he says, a lot of work had to be done over a short period of time.
“But I would say that the added complexity of the DOD remote workforce is that so much of the work is classified,” he says. “It is a huge cultural challenge.”
So a core group of engineers, program managers and the DOD Cloud Computing Program Office worked with Microsoft to roll out CVR on an aggressive timeline, Metz explains.
“We had to have the guidance and policies in place to ensure that the data would be protected and to figure out what kind of data would be allowed to be transmitted within that environment,” she says. “We were able to leverage an existing contract to do an initial six-month Teams deployment in their commercial environment.”