Hawkins: Mobility As a Disruptive Technology

Lt. Gen. Ronnie Hawkins, USAF, Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, always sees mobile through the eyes of a warfighter. “Mobility means a lot of things to a lot of different people,” he told the inaugural edition of the “AFCEA Answers” radio program (listen here). “When we look at it from the perspectives of what we do in the Joint Information Environment, we see it as one of the disruptive technologies that we’re bringing to bear.”

Gen. Hawkins says mobile gives the military the ability to, “move information where ever we need to move it, and also be able to do it from a platform that does not tie us to a desk.” And it puts that information, he adds, anywhere the warfighter might need it.

One of the top challenges for delivering that information to the warfighter in theater is keeping data secure, according to Kevin Manwiller with CISCO Systems. “Security is top of mind anytime you are bringing mobile devices onto the network,” he says, adding that industry needs to develop commercial off-the-shelf solutions to do that.  

CISCO’s Mike Mulville adds, “The always-there, anywhere, always on, no matter where you go, whether its secure or unsecure, those are the kinds of challenges that we in industry are trying to meet.”

What does mobile mean to you? Do you agree it’s a disruptive technology, or is it a productivity enabler?

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