C4 Guide
Q& A
Deploying Reliable, Secure, Sustainable and Affordable IT
Lieutenant General Mark S. Bowman Director, C4/Cyber CIO/J6 Joint Staff
Lieutenant General Mark S. Bowman is the director for command, control, communications and computers (C4) / cyber, chief information officer, Joint Staff, J6/CIO, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C. He develops C4 capabilities; conducts analysis and assessments; provides joint and combined force C4 guidance, and evaluates C4 requirements, plans, programs and strategies for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Q: In the last year, since the J6 was re-established, what has it been up to and what is on the horizon? A: Here is what we are doing. In the last year we have been moving forward with the way ahead for the department’s information technology effectiveness of the DoD IT Enterprise Strategy and Roadmap. It has been a huge undertaking. Our partnership with Ms. Teri Takai, DoD chief information officer, for enterprise service governance and with Lieutenant General Ronnie Hawkins, director, Defense Information Systems Agency [DISA], for enterprise services has never been stronger. In order to get started, we broke the problem into pieces. Internal to the J6, we changed how we do business. By being more frugal, we consolidated assets, getting rid of items not being used such as copiers, printers and deactivated unused phone lines. In partnership with DISA, the Joint Staff migrated 100 percent of users to Defense Enterprise Email on NIPRNet by late 2012 and SIPRNet by early 2013. As of March 2013, DISA had more than 1 million customers on NIPRNet enterprise email across DoD. We are also making enterprise collaboration tools 16 | MIT 17.4
more accessible and shifting the mindset toward the cloud. The Joint Staff has over 4,000 thin client terminals operating on NIPRNet and SIPRNet, and we are on track to migrate about 80 percent of the Joint Staff to thin client by December 2014. The old way of doing business meant a laptop or hard drive was tucked away in a safe that was seldom opened, and the software was never updated. With thin client, one image per network is “pushed” to devices that are always on the network. This increases network security by reducing the cyber-attack surfaces and streamlining software updates, in addition to saving on power and environmental heating and cooling. Recently, we had an incident where controlled information was inadvertently sent to an unauthorized thin client. Within five minutes, the situation was fixed when the session was restarted and the information was removed on the thin client. This corrective action would have been significantly more painful six months ago; someone would have taken that user’s computer, it would have been gone for weeks, the hard drive would have been reformatted, and significant productivity and data would have been lost before the machine would have been returned. We are also doing what was previously thought to be unthinkable by replacing the Joint Staff Action Processing software. This coordination tool has been cumbersome and not interoperable with other DoD agencies since day one. Some thought it was a www.MIT-kmi.com