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Empowering Missions for C2E & JWCC Webinar

Empowering Missions Webinar

June 2, 2023

Empowering Missions for C2E & JWCC Webinar Recap

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, organizations across various sectors are increasingly adopting hybrid and multi-cloud strategies to meet their evolving needs. The concept of leveraging multiple cloud environments simultaneously offers a myriad of benefits, as well as presents some unique challenges.

In this blog post, we will explore the topics discussed during our recent Empowering Missions for C2E & JWCC Webinar, including the significance of hybrid/multi-cloud as a mission-critical approach, delve into the challenges faced, and highlight the exciting opportunities it presents for empowering missions as they adapt to the emerging Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept.

The Mission-Critical Nature of Hybrid & Multi-Cloud

Hybrid and multi-cloud environments are vital for organizations prioritizing flexibility, scalability, and resilience. They enable strategic workload distribution, optimizing performance and cost-efficiency, while reducing vendor lock-in risks and facilitating seamless migration between cloud providers.

Contracts like JWCC and C2E are significant in defense and intelligence. JWCC, awarded by the DoD to providers such as AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Google, aims to offer globally available cloud services to the tactical edge. C2E, the follow-on contract to C2S, awarded by the IC to the same providers plus IBM, focuses on delivering cloud services for the intelligence community. These contracts support the DoD’s vision of connecting platforms and sensors on the battlefield (JADC2) with an enterprise cloud capability across all security classifications.

The success of JADC2, crucial for modernizing defense and intelligence, relies on an enterprise cloud capability spanning the US to the tactical edge. JWCC and C2E contracts establish the foundation, enabling seamless integration, improved connectivity, and enhanced security across diverse cloud environments. These contracts are pivotal for advancing cloud technologies and facilitating mission-critical operations in defense and intelligence.

Challenges Faced

Defense customers face operational challenges when adopting commercial cloud solutions. The complexity and control issues associated with commercial cloud choice pose difficulties in managing on-premises and cloud environments seamlessly. Integration of systems and services in hybrid and multi-cloud environments requires a flexible unified operating platform.

“Challenges include application and service deployment fatigue, ensuring secure capabilities in software supply chains, and keeping up with evolving industry accreditations. The vast range of services from commercial cloud providers makes selecting the right platform for specific missions a complex task. Achieving operational continuity and regional failover capability between clouds and on-premises environments is crucial. Additionally, collaborating with competitors and harmonizing different cloud technologies presents challenges that require a common platform for decision-making and mission enablement.” Jen Webster, Account Executive, Greymatter.io

According to Deputy IC CIO Michael Waschull, the greatest challenge in adopting the C2E multi-cloud contract lies in fostering collaboration and cooperation among competing private sector mission partners. Rather than prioritizing individual technical provisions or lowest prices, instilling core values of collaboration becomes crucial for successful implementation.

Opportunities Ahead

Opportunities arise from integrating cloud technologies in defense and intelligence sectors. Cross-platform interoperability connects disparate databases, resources, sensors, and weaponry, enabling the United States to react and maneuver with superior precision and efficiency against tech-savvy global competitors. Leveraging the best cloud capabilities provides a strategic advantage.

“Implementing a zero-trust approach, like CISO zero-trust, ensures compliance with standards such as NIST 800.207 across all platforms, facilitating quick collection and analysis of audits to detect anomalous behavior, enhancing security measures.” Jen Webster, Account Executive, Greymatter.io

Enabling JADC2 through hybrid/multi-cloud empowers the DoD with enterprise-wide compute capabilities, enhancing monitoring, automation, and decision-making. Initiatives like JWCC support cloud prototypes in challenging environments, enabling hosting and compute capabilities. Improved resource management optimizes utilization of cloud and on-premises environments based on mission requirements, speed, and access needs. A unified application networking platform is essential for control, security, and visibility across all environments.

“These opportunities enhance operational capabilities, strengthen security measures, and optimize resource management within defense and intelligence sectors. By harnessing cloud technologies effectively, organizations can gain a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving landscape.” Jen Webster, Account Executive, Greymatter.io

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Greymatter’s Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Solutions For The Warfighter

Greymatter’s unified application networking platform offers hybrid and multi-cloud solutions for the warfighter, delivering a range of benefits. It enhances mission interoperability by providing a unified platform that enables control, security, and monitoring of mission capabilities across diverse environments, ensuring seamless interoperability.
Our platform enables faster and cost-effective delivery of new capabilities by expediting the Risk Management Framework process and decoupling security controls from unique capability functions. This streamlined approach accelerates deployment while maintaining robust security requirements.
With Greymatter’s sense-making and overwatch tools, our customers can capture application networking status, metrics, and audits, ensuring transparency and accountability in access control. This feature enhances visibility and provides valuable insights for efficient management.
The platform ensures future-proof NIST zero-trust compliance, meeting almost 100% of the requirements defined in NIST 800.207 out of the box. By staying ahead of evolving security standards, customers can confidently adapt to changing security needs.
Greymatter’s overwatch tool significantly reduces mean time to resolution of issues, minimizing downtime and improving operational efficiency. This empowers faster incident response and resolution, optimizing mission readiness.
By leveraging Greymatter, platform engineering’s netsecops process is enhanced by over 1000%, reducing networking configuration code blocks by more than half. This enables developers to prioritize app development, eliminating the necessity to hard-code security requirements. Applications can maintain compliance as security needs evolve, thereby reducing the development-to-operations timeframe.
Finally, Greymatter’s IL6+ certification, coupled with compliance with FIPS and NIST standards, ensures that the platform is accredited for use on the most sensitive networks, providing a secure and trusted solution for defense customers.

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Overarch

The adoption of hybrid & multi-cloud strategies has become mission-critical for organizations seeking to leverage the benefits of scalability, flexibility, and resilience in the digital age. While challenges such as deployment fatigue and configuration management exist, the opportunities for cross-cloud interoperability, improved resource management, and enhanced mission capabilities are significant.

By embracing hybrid & multi-cloud, organizations can empower their missions, deliver new capabilities faster, reduce downtime, and lower operational costs. The journey towards hybrid & multi-cloud is undoubtedly transformative, propelling organizations towards a more agile and interconnected future.

GREYMATTER MULTI-CLOUD ARCHITECTURE

Greymatter Cloud Architecture

“Our approach to NAC (network as code) simplifies configuration management and deployment complexity, addressing the challenge of configuring applications and APIs across multiple cloud environments. Additionally, we mitigate supply chain risk by employing the standardized GitOps approach to zero trust and application interconnectivity within the SDLC.” Billy Miller, Solutions Architect, Greymatter.io

Greymatter reduces boilerplate network configurations for security and traffic flow activities such as adding mTLS to APIs, outlier detection active and passive health checks, and regional failover in many cases by well over 500%.

To ensure traffic control and regional failover across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, we provide flexibility in choosing deployment targets across all available cloud service providers (CSPs) and infrastructures. This capability enhances continuity of operations (COOP) and improves operational mission readiness.

“With our platform, audit trails are comprehensive, enabling visibility into service and application usage at a granular level. Through rich user and persona-based activity tracking with time series metrics, potential anomalous behavior, both service-oriented and user-oriented, can be easily identified.” Billy Miller, Solutions Architect, Greymatter.io

Our high-level architecture incorporates GitOps as the fundamental glue that holds together configuration and deployment throughout the mesh. Moreover, our custom GSL configuration language empowers users to self-serve and onboard with minimal reliance on third-party interactions. This combination of features enhances simplicity, control, and efficiency within the application deployment process.

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Delve into the Details

Curiosity piqued? Immerse yourself in our webinar presentation and webinar recording, plus screen grabs from our demo, where you’ll find a wealth of resources waiting to be explored.

Don’t hesitate to schedule a demo of your own with Billy Miller and the Greymatter team to learn how our application networking platform can help your enterprise control complexity, secure applications and see real-time operations.

Or book a meeting with either Andre Brown, Sales Representative, or Jen Webster, Account Executive, for more information.

Empowering Missions

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