Army Shares with Air Force

The U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) have signed an architecture-sharing and modernization agreement, which enables the Air Force to take advantage of Army excess information technology capacity. The arrangement will help the Air Force save the approximately $1.2 billion it would have spent to upgrade to multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) routers and regional security stacks.

Army force structure changes created the extra capacity. Simultaneously, the Air Force has been working toward modernizing its architecture to take advantage of the Joint Information Environment. The two services will have access to data from DISA-owned and -operated joint regional security stacks as a joint capability; their cyber components will continue to execute cyber defense on their own networks.

In addition to cost savings, the MPLS routers will increase backbone bandwidth to 10 gigabytes per second. Some current bandwidth speeds are operating at 650 megabytes per second. The larger-capacity routers also will help the Air Force and Army converge their enterprise network backbones and gain cost savings in other areas, Army officials say.

For information on the Joint Information Environment Enterprise Operations Center, watch DISA's video: