DISA's Strategy For Cross-DOD Networks Faces Mounting Budget Pressures

This year, the Defense Information Systems Agency has ambitious plans to streamline and speed up how military personnel access applications and services on the Defense Department’s computer networks. These efforts include launching a new pan-service user environment, making enterprise services easier to use and access, increasing the offerings and capabilities of cloud based systems, and providing a mobile device infrastructure for the services to use.

But all of those efforts are being buffeted by the uncertainty of monumental Defense budget cuts, and increasing pressures on IT budgets in particular.

Doing more with less has become a routine goal for the agency that runs the DOD’s IT and communications backbones. But to do so, DISA officials say it has never been more important to make accessing services and information easier across the services.

One of DISA’s top priorities for 2013, and a key part of its Strategic Plan, is helping create the Joint Information Environment, an information sharing space that links together all of the DOD’s various networks into a single architecture that eliminates redundancies and allows users to more effectively and securely get information when they need it, from any approved device, anywhere.

The JIE is the most important part of DISA’s strategic plan, said Anthony Montemarano, the agency’s director for strategic planning and information. The effort is underway and is being endorsed by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “The Joint Information Environment is our future,” he said.

JIE is not a technology insertion effort, Montemarano said. Its goal is to bring the services together in a common infrastructure. DISA and the services are working jointly to set up the environment. And while it will take advantage of new technologies, the JIE itself won’t develop any new software and hardware, he said.