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GCN Home > 08/18/03 issue

DOD’s Shopping Cart

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

How commissaries secured their wireless networks

The Defense Commissary Agency operates 276 stores and a handful of warehouses around the world. It discounts $5 billion worth of groceries and household items each year to active and retired military personnel and their families.
NCR wireless cash registers
Image: Courtesy of Defense Commissary Agency
NCR wireless cash registers give DeCA the flexibility to move points of sale anywhere inside its stores, or even outside.

“We’re the military grocer,” said John Goodman, chief of technology management at DeCA headquarters at Fort Lee, Va.

“Of course, $5 billion in sales is peanuts if you are comparing us to commercial grocers,” added Janet Haase, chief of the infrastructure division at DeCA’s IT directorate. But commissaries are an essential part of the military benefits package, helping families survive on modest military pay by selling them essential goods at 5 percent over cost.

DeCA is in the midst of a modernization program to reduce its costs and increase sales. A computer-assisted ordering system has improved in-stock rates for products, and the agency has set a goal of achieving IT parity with commercial equivalents by the end of fiscal 2004.

One of the technologies DeCA is counting on is wireless networking. For example, wireless cash registers from NCR Corp. of Dayton, Ohio, can be moved around the stores for special sales or to accommodate spikes in business. Handheld and vehicle-mounted wireless devices assist in inventory tracking and ordering.

“We have a wireless network in each of our stores and in most of our central warehouses,” Goodman said. “We got into wireless networking back in the 1990s. At that time, the industry thought it was secure.”

Since then, the Defense Department and much of the rest of the world has discovered that wireless networks are only as secure as you make them.

Constant hacking

“We’re a part of DOD,” Goodman said. “We get hackers from foreign countries probing us constantly. We don’t want to be an entry point to the DOD network.”

DeCA’s wireless network is separate from the wired one, but the two connect at some points to permit routing over the Defense Information Systems Network.

To protect its IEEE 802.11b wireless networks, DeCA has fine-tuned its access points and is installing AirFortress security gateways from Fortress Technologies Inc. of Tampa, Fla.



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