War Rooms Reimagined: Sponsored Content

As if cyber vulnerabilities during the pre-pandemic years weren’t worrisome enough, now cyber warriors must contend with a slate of issues. A new concern is two-fold: How to shore up the creep of pervasive vulnerabilities introduced by a remote and hybrid workforce and how to harness and empower it with efficiencies, built-in security and ease-of-use solutions to help get the job done—at speed and scale.    

The spike in cyber attacks and breaches are more concerning than ever, as noted in the new cybersecurity executive order signed by President Joseph Biden on May 12. The urgency for both enhanced security and the collaboration tools to meet the demands for distributed, real-time and asynchronous information sharing is palpable.

The need: secure, virtualized war rooms.

Enter Bluescape. The California-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider makes secure collaborative work possible in a shared digital workspace—from anywhere, on
any device. The company’s solutions centralize data and intelligence in a single pane of glass to meet several mission needs, including but not limited to:

• Unifying streams of information to create a common operating picture.

• Enabling fast-paced, decentralized operations across command structures.

• Increasing the flow of shareable data and intelligence to teams and mission partners.

Government customers including the U.S. Defense Department (DoD) and others leverage Bluescape’s virtual collaboration solution to increase situational awareness and visual intelligence, deployable on a public or private cloud network and on-prem for maximum flexibility and security.

“Digital transformation places a high premium on data and the actionalble intelligence it produces,” said Demian Entrekin, chief technology officer at Bluescape. “Solutions that will survive government and commercial scrutiny must make sure that data is readily accessible and protected.”

In May, Bluescape entered a level 4 authority to operate (ATO) that provides all Defense Department personnel—uniformed and civilian—access to Bluescape technology. “In today’s new working world, we recognize the mission-critical need for secure environments that provide collaboration in real-time,” Bluescape CEO Peter Jackson said in a press statement announcing the ATO. “We’re humbled to help pioneer the next phase of digitization within the DoD and are thrilled our software will play an integral role in accelerating innovation within the defense ecosystem.”

For years, the Defense Department—in fact, the whole of the U.S. government—has labored to modernize its information technology infrastructure. The ATO, entered into with the Naval Systems Engineering Resource Center (NSERC), brings a critical visual collaboration solution to the DoD to help in the department’s modernization effort and provide turnkey secure cloud services that support the warfighter mission.

“As the DoD continues to modernize, we are excited to have received an ATO for the new NSERC environment, which includes cloud applications that can be built and deployed across the entire DoD,” Bob Simmons, NSERC Program Manager at Naval Sea Systems Command, said in a statement. “NSERC provides mission partners with secure cloud services that support the warfighter mission, and users can continue to drive faster decisions, no matter where they are located.”

On the commercial side, the Ford Motor Company is one of many Fortune 100 companies to have invested in Bluescape to develop its remote and hybrid workplace strategy and boost productivity and employee retention.

But for all its recent successes, Bluescape’s vision began years before the recent pandemic struck. The company was founded in 2012, initially creating immersive, multiscreen, collaborative workspaces before shifting entirely to a cloud-based solution for virtual work. “Virtual workspaces let teams create and gather around their content to see the big picture and every small detail, all in one place, and without compromising security,” Entrekin said.

In 2015, Bluescape partnered with technology integration and consulting service Bridge Core to enable government leaders to share information, collaborate on that information and make up-to-date decisions rapidly in a digital environment. Fast forward five years, and the value of the partnership and the platform was corroborated shortly after the pandemic shuttered businesses and affected government operations in March 2020. Years of preparation positioned Bluescape to be at-the-ready with its solution when a government office of medical support personnel needed an immediate action plan to track and report transmission of the virus across its workforce.

The resulting plan was briefed to the medical director office within 30 minutes, a tight turnaround for such a massive-scale problem. How? Bluescape’s capabilities allowed participating nurses and doctors to simultaneously design, edit and collaborate on a response plan in real-time and from multiple geographic locations, saving precious time and effort.

By bringing teams, their content and their applications all into one virtual workspace, Bluescape makes collaboration more effective and teams more connected. “Bluescape is nonprescriptive in the way it allows people to create their work environment,” Entrekin said. “In other words, sometimes not having the perfect bespoke tool is the best option you can have. Bluescape is more of a workbench than a hammer. It lets customers visually decide what they need, and to design and make decisions from there.”

The Silicon Valley-based company continues to scale and innovate to accommodate the growing demand for its collaborative canvas and flexible cloud platform. Recent innovations include integrations 
with Cisco Webex, Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Bluescape’s abilities to enable remote and hybrid workforces were recognized when it was named to Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies earlier this year.

For more information, go to www.bluescape.com

The Next-Best Thing to Being in the Same Room with Your Team

Do just about anything you can do gathered in a room:

• Whiteboarding

• Brainstorming

• Presentations

• Content Reviews

• Project Management

• Strategic Planning

• Decision Making

• Customer Meetings

• Education and Training