The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is in the midst of a major modernization program of the government’s 30-year-old top secret network – the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System (JWICS).
Originally designed to facilitate video conference meetings, the IT network now handles email and other critical data, including highly confidential intelligence information. In 2011, JWICS was used to send a live feed of the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden to the White House. Today, the network serves hundreds of thousands of members of the intelligence community across the globe, including the DIA and FBI.
A pivotal step in advancing the modernization endeavor involves transitioning to the cloud. Earlier this year, DIA outlined its strategy to realize the future architecture of the JAICS through multi-award cloud contracts encompassing the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contracts and the intelligence community’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise (C2E) contracts.
In addition to achieving its goal of increased network capacity, bandwidth, and improved customer services, DIA hopes the cloud will create an integrated global infrastructure for data sharing. An infrastructure to break down silos between intelligence agencies and battlespace commanders.
The cloud is ideally suited for accomplishing these goals. However, multi-cloud environments can get complicated, quickly. For IT teams familiar with on-premises or single-cloud setups, hybrid solutions can present complexity, even chaos, and are a challenge to oversee using conventional, siloed monitoring tools. For instance, a problem anywhere in the network can take hours, even days to discover, potentially threatening the security, performance, and accessibility of mission-critical systems.
Fortunately, there is a better option for ensuring the resilience and security of the complex, multi-cloud JWICS environment: AIOps.
What is AIOps?
AIOps not a new concept. It was first introduced by Gartner in 2016, but only now are government agencies leveraging the technology to gain smarter insights into their digital infrastructure, specifically multi-cloud environments.
AIOps encompasses an array of technologies, tools, and processes to help organizations manage hybrid IT operations at scale. The integration of AI is indispensable due to the impracticality of relying solely on human oversight to manage modern IT environments and increased attack surfaces, without intelligent automation. AIOps helps IT teams break through overwhelming telemetry and metrics generated by modern environments by proactively identifying and resolving issues – across the tech stack from applications to network – before they cause security issues or service interruptions.
In this way, AIOps is an important step towards the proactive management of digital services and autonomous, self-healing operations.
Let’s take a close look at how AIOps can benefit the JWICS modernization initiative:
AIOps for Better, Autonomous Threat Response
JWICS is the highest-level network in the Department of Defense’s information cyberspace and is a vulnerable target for cyberterrorism. In 2010, the network was targeted by Chelsea Manning who accessed and leaked sensitive intelligence about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to Wikileaks. These threats have continued unabated. In recent years, JWICS has seen a 150 percent uptick in cyber threats.
A key focus of DIA’s modernization efforts is a more offensive approach to cybersecurity. But hybrid IT networks and workloads present a big challenge for federal IT pros: visibility. According to the annual SolarWinds Public Sector Cybersecurity Survey, 47 percent of public sector IT pros cited hybrid environments as their top visibility challenge, exposing them to potential cyber risks and threats.
Without a holistic view of their environments, understanding the overall cybersecurity posture of the JWICS network’s expansive infrastructure is almost impossible. If a security vulnerability or issue occurs, determining the root cause is particularly difficult.
AIOps can help overcome these challenges. Instead of relying on disparate tools that only provide surface-level visibility into risks, AIOps automatically collects and autonomously analyzes data sets from across hybrid environments in real time to deliver maximum visibility into security risks and the context needed to inform remediation.
But AIOps is even smarter. It continuously learns over time, observing the JWICS environment and providing insight into the root cause of security vulnerabilities, how certain events will impact the network’s security posture, and even triggering mitigation workflows – with little to no human intervention.
In this way, AIOps helps DIA realize its goal of behavioral-based vulnerability detection, smart insights across the cloud and application stack, and a more autonomous network. Think of it as security-as-a-service.
AIOps to Boost Resilience
AIOps extends beyond safeguarding JWICS security; it is a powerful approach for guaranteeing network resilience.
A modern multi-cloud JWICS network, although seamless to the end user, is complex, dynamic, and too expansive for humans alone to manually process and analyze the enormous amount of data collected. Likewise, stove-piped dashboards and a sea of alerts can make it hard to identify real issues, not to mention being a costly and inefficient way to monitor any environment.
AIOps addresses this problem by going beyond traditional monitoring and siloed views to provide consolidated observability.
Using AIOps, network administrators can gain a single pane of glass view into the multi-cloud environment. Working in the background, AIOps continuously observes data movement and the connections between devices and applications to automatically identify anomalies and bottlenecks before network uptime and data availability is impacted.
With this increased operational awareness event noise is reduced, and administrators can rapidly focus on actual problems, wherever they exist across their complex, distributed systems. In addition, as with the security threat monitoring use case described above, AIOps also predicts certain situations – such as throughput or utilization capacity issues – so that IT teams can plan changes and upgrades in advance.
With this level of observability and automation, administrators can simplify hybrid IT complexity and move from a reactive to a proactive approach to network management.
Implementing AIOps
AIOps is no longer simply a concept, advanced AIOps capabilities are part of the SolarWinds® Platform.
Designed to help organizations with too much data and not enough insights manage and secure complex hybrid IT environments, SolarWinds can help agencies like DIA shift towards autonomous IT operations – a key goal of the JWICS modernization program.
With process-centric AIOps solutions, DIA’s IT pros gain a near-real-time common operating picture of their hybrid IT environment in one place. At the same time, the national intelligence mission gets the actionable intelligence needed for more informed decision-making across all domains.
To quote DIA Director, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, “I can’t do anything if the network isn’t as good as it can be.” AIOps is the answer.
Tim Schnelle is a retired Marine Corps Officer with over 25 years of service. He served as a Naval Aviator flying CH-53E helicopters, as well as flying for HMX-1, the Presidential Helicopter Squadron, to support four administrations. He served his joint tour as Director of the President’s Emergency Operations Center. He is now a member of the Federal Team at SolarWinds.