San Diego — The phrase "mission resilience-interoperability" in the cyber domain does not exactly roll off the tongue like a poem, but its meaning is easily explained: According to Ron Foudray, vice president for business development at Northrop Grumman Information Systems, it means "creating capabilities, not just to protect and defend, but also to react and recover from cyber events."
The company is in attendance at this week's West 2015 sea services expo to showcase its wares.
The Navy, Foudray noted, has been "leaning forward" with its Task Force Cyber Awakening initiative, which began in July 2014 and address the problems left by fragmented approach the service had previously taken with it systems and platforms.
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And in support of that initiative, Northrop Grumman Information Systems offers a number of solutions that help the user take a holistic approach to cyber security. For example, the company has a Cyber Situational Awareness software suite that visualizes net threats.
"Any event that happens in the IP space, when all the data comes in, we can plot that out in the digital IP space, and we created maps for that," Foudray said.
All those maps of cyber activity happening in various locations and to various organizations can then be tied together, allowing users to see how this activity affects their overall enterprise.
The suite is currently being used by unidentified customers in DoD and the intelligence community. But who are the potential Navy users?
Foudray sees a number of them – from "folks in operations centers ashore or afloat" to deployed U.S. Navy cyber mission forces, to "a command and control element at a combatant command level or at a much higher executive level."
Though he declined to discuss his company's solutions relative to competitors, he does cites his company's experience in the cyber domain. "We have been investing in cyber from an advanced threat perspective," that is, threats "not able to be seen by signatures or by traditional machine learning algorithms," he said.
The company has also been leveraging experience drawn from work on various IT networks, including its own. "We actually try out our own tools and capabilities on our own networks before we put in a customer environment," he noted.
Besides its Cyber Situational Awareness software suite, Northrop also had on display its secure mobile communications family of systems.
Able to fit into a small briefcase and less cumbersome than earlier systems, these devices use commercial AE256 encryption that "allows you to have secure communications" – calls and data – "at multiple classification levels."
Northrop's most recent SCS system, the SCS-400, billed as a "field-deployable headquarters" was unveiled last November.
