Page 43 - FCW, March/April 2021

Sunsetting CVR but keeping the collaboration
Commercial Virtual Remote, spun up last year to support pandemic telework, goes away this summer. DISA’s Global Directory is the key to ensuring the cloud collaboration continues.
by Troy K. Schneider
The Defense Department launched the Commercial Virtual Remote environ- ment to accommodate telework during the COVID-19 pandemic. It quickly became the largest Microsoft Teams deployment in the world and brought department-wide collaboration tools to DOD after years of less successful attempts.
DOD employees have embraced the tools and the silo-spanning interactions they enable, but CVR was always intend- ed to be a temporary fix. Therefore, the Defense Information Systems Agency is working hard to ensure that the collabo- ration doesn’t fade when CVR sunsets in July.
Les Benito, director of operations at DISA’s Cloud Computing Program Of- fice, said Global Directory is the key. He told FCW that the initiative will provide “a cloud-wide identity” as the military services spin up their own Microsoft 365 environments under the Defense Enter- prise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract.
DISA began developing Global Direc- tory last summer with the goal of aug- menting, not replacing, existing identity and access management systems, Benito added.
System owners “still control access within their individual tenancies,” he said, but having a shared identity frame- work will allow for “a CVR-like experi- ence that users have grown to expect.”
A minimum viable product was tested in the fall, and DISA is now using Global Directory for its DOD365 implementa- tion. In addition, the Army and Navy have adopted it for their DEOS imple- mentations, with the Air Force and the U.S. Southern Command coming on board in April and “others to follow this
summer,” Benito said.
Department of the Air Force CIO
Lauren Knausenberger said the Air Force will fully transition back to its own Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services program before CVR ends in June. The cross-department integration is “not as interoperable as I’d like it to be yet,” she told FCW, but DISA and the military
services are trying to address the sticking points and ensure that some of CVR’s more modern features are adopted.
“People are now used to that,” Knau- senberger said. “The whole culture has shifted, and people understand how absolutely critical it is to work anywhere you need to work and to have collabora- tion tools that actually work.” n
Can CBII make telework more secure?
DISA’s Cloud-Based Internet Isolation is a seamless solution for protecting DOD networks
by Lauren C. Williams
When mass telework began a year ago in response to the COVID-19 pan- demic, the Defense Department faced a sharp spike in cyberattacks against its networks. The Defense Information Systems Agency is fighting back, in part by developing the Cloud-Based Internet Isolation solution.
CBII allows users to browse nongov- ernment websites while keeping online threats from moving onto DOD’s net- work, reducing endpoint attacks and bandwidth demands at the same time.
“CBII has been that solution that enables missing partners to solve their bandwidth constraints, especially in response to mass telework due to COVID-19,” Laurel Lashley, DISA’s CBII program manager, told FCW. “For mis- sion partners who are operating in low- bandwidth, high-latency environments, CBII has been the solution for them to conserve bandwidth for their mission- essential functions.”
After a pilot test, DISA moved CBII into production in September 2020, with the ultimate goal of migrating all DOD users to the solution. So far, 190,000 us- ers at 25 organizations have been moved to CBII, with the Defense Health Agency as the largest adopter at 160,000 users. Lashley said 1.5 million users will be mi- grated by the end of fiscal 2021.
“Our approach is to onboard the DOD services, combatant commands, and the defense agencies and field activities with a sizable sampling of users in this first year,” she added. In 2021, the 11 combat- ant commands “will be prioritized for migration at 100% of their applicable users, and then the remaining license will be allocated for the services and will incrementally increase 200%” by the end of fiscal 2024.
CBII is expected to save DOD the more than $300 million it would have cost to upgrade cybersecurity tools to defend internet access points, according
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