Following the Pentagon’s lead on creating a joint information technology environment, the Intelligence Community’s version is operational after several years of investment, its chief information officer said May 13.
“What started out as a concept nearly 2.5 years is now operational and scaling to meet the needs of all the IC’s missions,” Al Tarasiuk, CIO for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the AFCEA JIE Mission Partner Symposium in Baltimore, Md.
Like DoD’s Joint Information Environment (JIE), the IC is developing a common IT framework for its various agencies called the Intelligence Community Information Technology Environment (IC ITE, pronounced “eyesight”). Previously, intelligence agencies individually procured and managed all of their IT in house. As budgets waned following their peak after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, officials realized the need to reduce the 20 percent of the National Intelligence Program’s budget going toward IT. The DNI appointed agencies to be providers for specific IT services that would be shared throughout the community. For example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have been jointly tasked to provide cloud services, while the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) launched a common desktop.
“We placed constraints on the architecture, requiring that it had to be agile…it had to provide a platform for integrating and it couldn’t make us less secure than before,” Tarasiuk said.
While the process is ongoing, Tarasiuk pointed to accomplishments in cloud adoption, applications and security operations. The community’s cloud–known as GovCloud–is operational, with safeguards for information sharing and common analytical tools. Nearly 5,000 employees use DIA and NGA’s desktop, which provides a common suite of desktop applications. Tarasiuk said he hopes to increase that number to 50,000 users over the next year. NSA has moved 400 applications to its Applications Mall since August. The mall will help rationalize and verify applications so that they can be safely used across the IC. In January, a new operations center opened to secure the joint environment.
IC CITE has developed separately from JIE, but Tarasiuk said his office is working more closely with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) to evolve IC ITE and JIE together. In April, IC CITE and DISA officials began working on leveraging the IC’s experience with Top Secret domains and bringing those services to Secret and Unclassified domains. Additionally, the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise (DI2E) was established as a unifying construct between JIE and IC ITE. DI2E ensures that architectures, definitions and services remain consistent across DoD and the IC, he said. Commercial IT providers also have the opportunity to attend DI2E “plugfest” forums to see how their products fit into the environment.