The Army’s Unified Network Operations initiative isn’t just a consolidation and modernization effort. UNO is also a mirror for the service to see itself.
Leo Garciga, the Army’s chief information officer, said UNO will shine a brighter light on the Army’s technology stack and let it turn off duplicative applications and systems like they never could before.
“Unifying the network is that very first step to being able to see ourselves and operationalize the network in a way that lets us take action that historically you would only have in pockets across the army. Now we’ve got that at an enterprise level,” Garciga said on Ask the CIO. “From an optimization perspective, I think the bigger thing strategically that as an Army we’re working is we’ve been on this unified network plan for a while. It’s this idea of really taking and centralizing services and delivering them very differently to the force versus distributed services across the service. That’s where I think we’re seeing the money savings. Two things are happening: We have got to change our tactics, techniques and protocols (TTPs), which UNO is driving a lot of that. I think the bigger thing is we’re very quickly finding where we have opportunities not to just optimize our delivery model, but where we have opportunities to sunset some legacy capabilities and really rethink organizationally how we deliver and that’s where we’re finding the most of the bang for the buck.”
The Army has been developing UNO for the better part of three years. Through this initiative the Army wants to create an agile, software-defined network that is easy to set up and use.
Garcgia said by consolidating networks across the Army, the help desk or the cybersecurity analysts can more easily address problems in real time.
“We can tell you what trouble tickets are getting put in, how long they take to answer, and while it seems trivial, if I have 50% of the Army that puts this trouble ticket at 30% of the time, why? Finding out that we’ve got this legacy TTP that we forgot about, that was written in 1980 that we’re following, that we don’t need to, we’ll kill that, boom!” he said. “The ability to do that right is only enabled by having the unified network. I think on the cybersecurity side, the visibility at scale of endpoints, and being able to make informed decisions on risk is really important. That’s what the unified network is bringing. It’s bringing those metrics now and making them visible across the enterprise so we can have a very open conversation on the risks that we’re going to take, and also of where we need to take action immediately.”
Army reducing apps
Another benefit that the move toward UNO is already having is on reducing the number of redundant applications.
Garciga said the Army is looking at business systems, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms to determine how much they are spending on these systems and see if they can reduce costs.
“We’re now at very much the next stage, which is like, hey, 20% of these are kind of doing the same thing. Let’s go rationalize these now and really make some decisions that make folks uncomfortable,” he said. “Having that visibility has given us the opportunity to ask questions like, ‘how many people are actually using that capability? And by the way, are you aware that in this other enterprise capability is available?’ By being able to make those quick decisions and saying, ‘Hey, for $40,000 I can move you in here, versus paying $2.5 million a year, for example.’ Making that decision versus continuing down the path we’re on right now with multiple capabilities and resourcing associated with it is, from my perspective right now, proof that we’ve matured to that next stage outside of the unified network work, which has really been focused around that application rationalization piece across the board.”
A recent example of this came with an application that the Army moved to the cloud several years ago. Garciga said what they realized was a decision to take the application off-premise didn’t address the technical debt of the system, and they were replicating storage across regions and across the country when they didn’t have to.
“It took just folks saying, ‘Hey, why are you doing that?’ There was this rationalization that happened because we were really asked if we can reduce the resourcing and cloud costs. Where can we optimize? It was very clear that nobody had ever just asked a fundamental question: Why are you doing that? What requirement is there to do that?” he said. “That really let us relook at the entire approach to storage. We found out so many great things, like we didn’t have any rules for how we were going to do it. The functional office had given a requirement a decade ago that really wasn’t valid anymore in the cloud so we were able to really fix a lot of those things and reduce the program costs just for storage by about 42%. That happened in like a week’s worth of work just saying, ‘Why?’ And asking these questions. So that’s where you start rationalizing even the infrastructure where our capabilities are delivered.”
cArmy platform updated
Another key factor in this optimization and rationalization effort is the development of and promotion of enterprise services. Garciga said educating the program managers about what already exists and how they can, for example, use an accredited low code, no-code platform to support their needs.
Going forward, Garciga said the revamped cArmy platform will help commands and programs with further optimization, rationalization and modernization.
“We ran to cloud, set up an entire infrastructure, laid this foundation and it was a good first shot. We spent the last couple of months really kind of re-baselining some of those core services, and we just started onboarding a big portion of the Army to what we call cArmy 2.0,” he said. “I think what we’re finding is by getting those core services so finely tuned and the security posture the way it is right now that we’re finding that most of the mature programs are very easily transitioning over. We’re really excited because it’s giving us from a metrics perspective, if it usually is going from taking eight months to get into cloud, we’ve had a couple of folks that we’ve successfully onboarded and accredited in 90 days. I call that a win by any measure. I think that we made the right move in reimagining how we were going to deliver this as a service.”
Garciga added moving cArmy to a managed service is helping to reduce costs for the programs. The platform, for example, meets the Army’s cybersecurity requirements, removing a big step and cost factor for program managers.
“We’re really seeing the real-life benefit, mostly from a resourcing perspective on those programs,” he said. “Then there’s a handful of programs who there just wasn’t the capability available when they first went to cloud, and now they have these capabilities and services that are available, especially in AWS that are managed and now they can leverage. We’re getting that effectiveness piece done at the same time too.”
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