Enterprise Tools that Modernize, Innovate and Defend the Navy’s Digital Transformation: Sponsored Content

The U.S. Navy is modernizing how it fights and operates in the modern battlespace by focusing on how information from sensors and other systems can quickly get to warfighters to help them make decisions, creating the need for a mission-proven technology platform to achieve a variety of digital transformation use cases.

Most of these efforts fall under the Department of the Navy’s Information Superiority Vision, which aims to upgrade the service’s infrastructure, develop and deploy new capabilities, and defend Navy data from cyber attack.

Part of this work is being done by Operation Flank Speed, which is moving Navy personnel to a single Microsoft Office 365 cloud environment with the goal of improving security and productivity. By the end of 2021, some 472,000 personnel transitioned to Flank Speed, which replaced the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Commercial Virtual Remote system and the Navy Marine Corps Intranet Office 365 (NMCI O365) environment.
Transitioning to a new cloud environment allows the Navy to focus on coordinating data collected by a variety of sensors, getting that information to warfighters and protecting it. One of the Navy modernization effort’s goals is to allow personnel the ability to get information from a variety of sources in near-real time to help them make better decisions in a variety of circumstances.

Enabling real-time decision making

Real-time situational awareness (RTSA) is the ability to get complete, actionable information about a situation and the broader operating environment to enable accurate decision making and then easily share that information quickly and securely. Besides military operations, RTSA has a number of other applications such as supply chain and network management, cybersecurity, logistics and emergency response.

In the Navy’s case, one facet of RTSA is the ability to observe what’s happening inside the service’s new cloud environment for network administration and cybersecurity purposes. One way to do this is with an observability solution that lets users see what’s happening on the network geospatially, which reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) for issues found in near-real time, said Andrue McElhaney, a solutions architect with Elastic.

Elastic is a search-based platform offering a range of solutions that enables users to collect and store data from a variety of sources and then allows them to use that data for logging, analytics and security—all on one platform. For the Navy, the company offers a variety of tools and services that allow different systems to synchronize and communicate with each other, providing enhanced visibility and situational awareness. This is an important point because one of the challenges the U.S. military faces is getting disparate legacy systems to securely communicate with each other.

Because the Navy and Marine Corps have personnel and units scattered across the planet, it is also important for widely dispersed systems to connect to each other to share information and for users to be able to create a common operational picture from this. This is where Elastic’s core search capability can help the Navy reach its Information Superiority Vision goals.

Elastic has three key differentiators regarding search, McElhaney said. One is cross-cluster search, which he describes as the ability to bring the question to the data coming in from remote sites and sensors, without need to move the data over already burdened networks. This extends to some tactical assets, allowing warfighters to make queries and get answers in near-real time, he said. The next is cross-cluster replication, which gives users the option to pull back information to a central location such as a command post or back to headquarters in the U.S. to make decisions.

The third differentiator is called searchable snapshots, which allows the Navy to store and access data in a frozen tier for longer periods of time. Being able to search back further over time enables Navy personnel to have a bigger reference picture for their searches, whether it is for sensor data or tracking logistics across a theater of operations.

This not only helps with the Navy’s RTSA, but it provides a historical perspective for users sifting through information such as what were past challenges (for a project or a system), are problems still being encountered, and/or how the situation can be improved, McElhaney explained.

Elastic’s search-based platform, deployable on cloud or on-premises, offers the Navy and other organizations a number of capabilities. The first is enterprise search, which allows users to query data from a variety of sources at mission speed to create operational documentation and plans, for example.

Another aspect is observability, which brings logs, metrics and application performance monitoring into one place, such as Elastic’s Kibana data visualization and exploration tool. This is useful as the Navy moves to a new cloud environment that connects platforms across the globe because it can give administrators a near-real time picture into any changes across the network.

This dynamic observability also helps with cybersecurity. Elastic’s Limitless XDR offering helps users prevent, detect and respond to threats at scale and use machine learning capabilities to protect offline devices, which is useful for shipboard networks.

Accelerating DevSecOps pipelines

Another important facet of the Navy’s Information Superiority Vision is to develop software capabilities while protecting the proprietary code. This is where development, security and operations, or DevSecOps, comes into play. DevSecOps is a design methodology where cybersecurity is built into software from the very beginning.

The Navy uses DevSecOps to accelerate its software development and the service has recently launched a number of efforts in the last year, such as the Black Pearl development platform that allows developers to bake in security features from a project’s outset.

Elastic fits into these environments by providing continuous monitoring capabilities. This is akin to the U.S. Air Force’s Platform One DevSecOps platform where Elastic provides both security and observability components, explained Nathan Stacey, director of solution architecture with Elastic. Additionally, Elastic has pre-approved software containers used by the Platform One team.

One reason the Air Force chose Elastic is for its strength in managing time-series data and large data sets, Stacey said. He added that observability and security, two of the company’s core solutions, are fit-for-purpose in DevSecOps environments. Elastic helps users collect data quickly and its dashboards help DoD personnel make smooth transitions between different software versions during the DevSecOps development process.

The Navy is rapidly embracing DevSecOps, as evidenced by a recent memorandum of understanding with the Air Force to cooperate on DevSecOps efforts. This agreement allows the Navy to replicate some of the Air Force’s work.

Where the Navy and Marine Corps are unique, however, are in continuous monitoring of legacy shipboard systems despite connectivity constraints. To solve this, they use Elastic observability tools like those used in DevSecOps environments as part of a containerized software and hardware solution that is easily transported and plugged into existing networks and systems.

“The older legacy systems that are on some of these ships, they’re very limited on hardware resources,” said McElhaney. Containers help in this aspect because it provides updated operating capabilities without straining existing legacy equipment and systems, he added.

Providing analytics and security at scale

Elastic’s analytics and security tools are currently in use by DoD cybersecurity service providers (CSSP) and cyber protection teams (CPTs), which support the Navy, Marine Corps and other service branches on use cases ranging from network security monitoring to threat hunting. With Limitless XDR, Elastic provides CSSPs and CPTs with deeper insights into host-based telemetry, protection and more.

The Navy is also exploring ways to gain an analytics advantage with a big data platform that serves as a single data store, enabling warfighters to easily share information, build common tools, and conduct mission planning and analysis, explained Paul Nguyen, Elastic’s director of DoD Mission Support. One area where Elastic adds immense value in big data environments like this is in enabling users to query a petabyte of data in under 10 minutes, ideal for long-term mission analysis.

These analytics and security capabilities are transferable to broader efforts, such as the DoD’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept. The Navy’s version of this is called Project Overmatch, which allows commanders to have a data analytics fabric that can connect to weapons systems and sensor data and provide real-time visibility into all this information.

“That is an opportunity that we feel strongly that we can help with speed, scale and relevance,” Nguyen said.

About Elastic

Elastic is a search company that maximizes data utility in real time. Customers worldwide use our search, observability and security stack to achieve data-dependent use cases like website search, microservice monitoring and IT/OT threat detection. Deployable on Gov-Cloud or on premises, Elastic delivers powerful insight, no matter the mission.

Contact navy@elastic.co to schedule a time to meet our Navy mission support team at AFCEA West 2022 or visit elastic.co/industries/public-sector/defense for more information.