Army CIO teases data strategy
Army CIO Bruce Crawford said the service is ready to release its data strategy, which will resemble more of a set of standards to manage the service's data lakes.
The Army expects to be rolling out data and modernization strategies in the near future, according to senior officials.
"The Army is ready to publish its data strategy," Army CIO Bruce Crawford said during a panel talk at Palo Alto Network's Ignite Federal '19 event Oct. 10. "And if I could replace the word strategy -- with respect to the data strategy -- I would say data standards because it's really about implementing common standards."
Those standards are key to building a zero-trust network. "As you think about the tenets of zero trust, one of them is our ability to monitor access, and one of them is our ability to capture institutional anomalies," such as when users deviates from their normal behavior on the network, Crawford said.
"We'll never get to data-sharing if we aren't ruthless in the implementation of the data standards," he said.
Crawford's comments came just ahead of the Association of the Army's annual conference that starts Oct. 14 -- a likely venue for policy announcements.
Relatedly, Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, the deputy commanding general for Army Futures Command, hinted that AFC's modernization strategy was in its final stages and could be made public soon. Speaking during a Brookings Institution event Sept. 24, Wesley said senior leaders were finishing up the strategy and that it could be released as early as October -- but no later than the end of the year.
Crawford emphasized that he wanted the data strategy to be more than "just publishing a document, but issuing an order to the Army that says execute" with Army Cyber Command and the CIO office and Army operations driving the effort.
This article first appeared on FCW, a sibling site of Defense Systems.