Meet the Vital Cyber Office You May Have Never Heard Of

Here’s a riddle: What organization provides information technology and cybersecurity products and services to decision-makers in the Pentagon and multiple military bases and key locations around the national capital region?

And here’s a hint: It supports 55,000 customers and 70,000 assets, defends against thousands of threats per minute and maintains more than 130 mission apps. There’s another hint in the subhead of this article.

If you guessed the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), you are partially correct. The fully correct answer is the Joint Service Provider (JSP) organization within DISA. If you haven’t heard of JSP, you’re probably not alone, according to DISA officials.

Sajeel Ahmed, the JSP director, said in an interview with SIGNAL Media that the organization works largely behind the scenes and that many may not know who it is providing their information technology capabilities. “We are the information technology service providers for the Department of Defense leaders ... anybody who works for the department, could be military, civilian or contractors. We touch them. They might not know that they are getting services from DISA’s JSP, but we touch them from the information technology perspective.”

JSP personnel are spread across roughly 20 locations in the national capital area. The JSP operates and defends the Defense Department headquarters’ key cyber terrain and supports Fort Belvoir, Andrews Air Force Base and Bolling Air Force Base, among other locations. That support includes desktops, laptops and telephone services and networks, namely the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network and its close cousin the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network. “Just anything needed for somebody to get the information technology to do their jobs. We provide almost anything and everything a user would need,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed listed three major priorities for the JSP. The first is to operate, update and defend the information technology infrastructure in the region. “We are one of the most probed locations by different cyber actors, so we have to be ready every second to defend it. That’s a priority every second for us,” he added.

The second is to continue improving the user experience. By providing the best possible technology infrastructure and seamlessly implementing innovations, JSP enables users to accomplish their missions, Ahmed indicated.

The innovations include adopting new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. “For example, we just recently implemented artificial intelligence into a service desk area where folks will call in for support for creating new accounts, password resets, account maintenance, those types of things, which we can quickly take care of by implementing artificial intelligence. Just by doing that, we are seeing 10 times improvement in the amount of time it took for us to take care of some of those things,” Ahmed reported.

The JSP also will be modernizing desktops and laptops and their management. “At the endpoint, from the user perspective, it becomes a better user experience. From a management perspective, it makes it easier and faster to make changes as needed, putting more stuff in the cloud infrastructure so that it’s more distributed and more flexible for any changes needed,” the JSP director explained.

Furthermore, the service desk environment will be updated. “We’re looking at improving those and inserting a lot more self-help for the users so they can just take care of issues themselves as they come up,” he added.

Additionally, the JSP will be providing more collaboration tools, such as Microsoft’s Whiteboard application. “[Microsoft] Teams has really worked out good for us for collaboration, but what other tools are available that the users could use to improve on their mission enhancements? It could be the Whiteboard capability. It could be trying to integrate the current voice systems, the telephones, more into Teams,” Ahmed offered.

The third priority is to ensure JSP employs a workforce ready to support users and to operate and defend the network. That includes providing courses and on-the-job training for JSP employees and contractors. The JSP employs a holistic approach to information technology management by “leveraging top talent across the department to deliver services that enhance network reliability and stability for mission success,” according to a DISA fact sheet.