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GCN Home > 03/21/07 web stories

CDMO will make you a believer

Intel sharing office demands system definitions, needs justifications.

By Wilson P. Dizard III

An interagency bureau that is winnowing some 800 systems for shifting data among classification levels and domains is forcing program managers to analyze their system connections and justify their special needs.

The Unified Cross Domain Management Office (CDMO) is creating a baseline set of about 14 data gatekeepers, formerly known as high assurance guards, as a core group of cross domain solutions (CDSs) to be used by both the intelligence community and the Pentagon.

“I have yet to meet a program manager who was using a system to connect two disparate domains [who could explain the need to transfer specific information for specific purposes in detail],” said Edward Bryant, the office’s chief technical director, who spoke yesterday at the FOSE trade show in Washington, sponsored by the 1005 Government Information Group.

CDMO staff members ask program managers who oversee existing cross domain solutions how their systems provide compelling advantages over the filters that the office already has anointed as members of its preferred baseline list, Bryant said. If the proffered systems don’t offer additional useful functions, they don’t make the list of baseline cross domain solutions, he added.

The office has defined 20 sets of data that flow across CDSs. As yet, none of the approved information filters addresses the problem of sharing streaming data, according to Bryant.

Awareness of the importance of the CDMOs work is trickling deeper through the intelligence community and the Pentagon, Bryant told an attentive audience. “More [program managers] are coming in [offering their CDSs for approval] and saying, ‘We didn’t know you were serious.’”

The CDMO does not set policies for reshaping the use of the information sharing systems, but gains its authority from Director of National Intelligence Office CIO Dale Meyerrose and Pentagon CIO John Grimes, Bryant said. Meyerrose and Grimes gave CDMO officials approval to implement their plans last year. Earlier Pentagon plans to achieve similar goals via a cross domain solution working group achieved some interagency coordination but foundered because they lacked high level authority, Bryant said.

The office for rationalizing the government’s crazy quilt of secret data sharing systems has focused so far on Defense Department and intelligence community CDSs. Almost all of the specialized information sharing solutions operate in the intelligence and Pentagon arenas, Bryant said.

More news on related topics: IT Security, Content / Record Management, Defense IT, FOSE News, IT Management



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