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GCN Home > 10/10/05 issue

Wizards of wireless

By Brad Grimes, GCN Staff

Defense experimentation lab builds a model for mobile computing

Still straddling the fence on whether to build a wireless network for your agency? Not sure if you can secure it properly? No idea whether it’s cost-effective, or even very useful?

Consider placing a call to the Joint Forces Command in Suffolk, Va., where the Joint Experimentation Directorate (J9) has built what is arguably the government’s most secure and efficient wireless LAN. You wouldn’t be the first to pick up the phone.

“Folks are really interested in what we’re doing. They’re looking for documentation and how they can mimic, in some ways, what we’ve done and use it in other areas,” said Derek Krein, J9’s head wireless engineer.

To date, folks have called mostly from other Defense Department agencies. Krein’s team has briefed representatives from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Navy-Marine Corps Intranet. But it’s also shared its wireless experiences with the Justice Department and the National Security Agency.

“And we have a large population of foreign liaison officers here at J9,” said Tony Cerri, the directorate’s head of experimentation engineering. Recently, J9 detailed its secure wireless infrastructure for officials from Germany, Singapore and Sweden. “It’s basically a cookbook,” Cerri said.

The ingredients of J9’s wireless LAN create what the team calls its defense-in-depth strategy: five layers of security to protect information that travels over J9’s wireless and wired networks.

Why five layers? Because when it first started building a WLAN in 2002, J9 quickly learned that no single product could provide adequate protection for an enterprise-level network. And despite being an experimentation lab, J9’s engineering team was in no mood to kick tires. It needed a secure WLAN to support its daily mission.

“We don’t innovate, we’re just solving problems,” Cerri said.

Today the WLAN supports more than 400 J9 users in three buildings. Roughly 270 of those users have adopted tablet PCs as their sole computing platform. Cerri said he’s been pleased with the way people have embraced the new model, which allows them to be more productive because they can access the network from anywhere.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, Mobile & Wireless, Defense IT, Management, IT Management



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