The Army may finally have found a solution to resolving some of its antiquated clunky communications issues. Official communications in the military (even if not classified) have to be done over official communications devices, be it a computer or a cell phone.
This forced soldiers to carry around Army-owned devices that were often outdated or didn't work well, if at all. The Army settled on a new policy called Bring Your Own Device or BYOD.
"The Army and NSA came up with a secure but unclassified system, a level below secret that allows you to share on a military file cloud system," an Army communications officer explained to Connecting Vets.
BYOD has been in development for some time, the idea being that the soldier will bring his personally owned cell phone to work but load a government-authorized app on his phone for official communications, which will be conducted over the cloud.
A headquarters, "with tactical comms now thinks if you can reach the internet why don't you just do those things in a cloud, for instance like building slides in google docs," the Signals officer explained.
For a time, the commercial messaging app Wickr was authorized for official military use, but the subscription prices were exorbitant in the opinion of some military leaders. There were also concerns about the data centers that would house the cloud where official Army data was stored. Would the commercial data centers meet military security requirements?
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Another issue mentioned behind closed doors was that by leasing commercial data centers for official military use, the department of defense was putting a bullseye on civilian infrastructure which could now be considered a legitimate military target during a war.
These issues were resolved by the Army creating its own service called the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency where the data will be stored.
Starting on Oct. 11, 20,000 soldiers will soon gain access to what could be described as an early access to the Army's BYOD program, and will begin using their own devices to conduct official business on the Army's cloud network.
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Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
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