The Defense Department should have all of its data on cloud storage services within five years, the department’s chief information officer told House members on Tuesday. That transition and the advent of Windows 10, he suggested, should help to keep foreign hackers out in the future.
“In five years I am hopeful that we’ll be in an almost complete virtual cloud environment,” Terry Halvorsen told members of the House Armed Services Committee. “We’ll have private clouds which are completely private within segments of DoD. We’ll have private clouds that are just DoD. We’ll have private clouds [with] other parts of the federal government.”
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“And then we’ll have hybrid public clouds,” he said. “Because of the size of DoD and the federal government, we ought to be able to move in to where we would have government hybrid clouds hosted in commercial centers … instead of on premise. That would give us the best combination of mission security and value.”
Halvorsen also issued a glowing endorsement of the Windows 10 operating system, which he said was far more secure than any of its predecessors. “The secretary has directed that this year we move DoD … to a Windows 10 baseline. I cannot stress the criticality of getting that done,” he said.
“Windows 10 is the first operating system that really thought about security right from the beginning,” he added.
He said a third major goal for the department was to finish deploying what are known as joint regional security stacks, a suite of cybersecurity equipment that will reduce the complexity involved with maintaining the thousands of firewalls that are currently erected under the Pentagon’s systems.
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Halvorsen was responding to inquiries about what the department was doing to modernize its systems, especially in light of a breach last of an email server belonging to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That breach, linked to the Russian government, affected about 4,000 users who had sent unclassified emails over the server.
