FEDTECH: DISA has successfully completed the pilot phase of Thunderdome. How does the program work?
SKINNER: From a network standpoint, Thunderdome enables us to leverage technology to redo how we do networking. As an example, software-defined WAN is kind of your VPN, so that your remote users are able to apply that and then bring security down to the edge. That's really what the Thunderdome OTA [Other Transactions Authority] is all about.
But when you think about Thunderdome at large and the activities within the zero-trust strategy for DOD, we have to add more components to it, such as identity or endpoint security. From a DISA Thunderdome framework standpoint, we accomplish about 130 of 150 activities defined in the DOD CIO zero-trust strategy. Within the next year, we plan on having it at about 60 sites and then just keep rolling out from there.
FEDTECH: This is not a new network. This is something that you put your network into, correct?
SKINNER: Correct. This will be a new way of networking. For example, JRSS — our joint regional security stacks — gave us a midtier level of network routing and security. There's a security component and then a routing of traffic, which is your networking piece. Thunderdome is that, plus a lot more.
We are going to implement Thunderdome, and then we're going to get rid of our JRSS stacks and all the other networking components that we have because that's going to be all covered with Thunderdome. The existing core infrastructure will be gone.
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