Intranet Installation Nears Completion

Signal, Sep 2007 by Lawlor, Maryann

The Navy and EDS team also has taken a proactive approach to resolving these issues through the Enterprise Performance Management Database (EPMD). Col. Cross relates that during the past couple of years, probes have been installed that monitor performance in near real time down to the device level. Feedback from the probes is collected weekly, and EDS opens internal trouble tickets as necessary to address the causes of the performance problems. Plans call for installing the probes down to the desktop level by the end of 2007.

Although from the users' perspective the intranet installation seemed to be one problem after another, the benefits of the NMCI cannot be dismissed. In addition to giving birth to innovative solutions such as the EPMD that can now be used in other large networks, the intranet has enhanced security of the Navy's networks.

Paola Arbour, interim chief operating officer at EDS for the NMCI program, points to the cryptographic log-on as one of the most significant advantages in helping the Navy comply with U.S. Defense Department mandates. When the department required the development and issuance of a single token to ensure security to both physical locations and networks, the Common Access Card (CAC) was created to foot the bill. Each CAC includes the credentials of the individual who holds it and allows personnel to enter both facilities and networks according to the access they have been granted.

The Defense Department stated that the CAC system had to be in place within six months of the issuance of its directive. The NMCI team had a CAC implementation plan; however, the rollout time was much longer than the designated six months, Arbour admits.

"The Defense Department uses a system that we stressed to the max because we not only installed the CAC system across the enterprise, but we did it in a six-month window. You can imagine that we had a lot of end users who were not necessarily our best friends during this, but we got it done and weathered the storm. The security is now there so if you are part of the operational arm of the DON [Department of the Navy] and you are tied into the DOD, you're a very happy person," Arbour says.

EDS relied heavily on its partners to make the CAC implementation a success story, Arbour shares. "It just was a painful undertaking, and quite frankly we asked our partners, our supplier partners, to do things that they didn't know they were capable of doing. Our customer knew that was going to happen. When you get a network this size, and you get a user base of over 500,000 users across the world that come and go, you're going to stress any system," she states.

Col. Cross and Arbour agree that the huge bump in security that the NMCI has caused is by far one of the biggest benefits of the intranet. Even by 2005, when the Far East seats were finally put into place, the network stopped 20 million unauthorized access attempts and trapped, quarantined and disinfected 70,000 viruses. This number more than tripled in 2006 as each month the intranet blocked approximately 9 million spam messages and detected more than 5.2 million unauthorized intrusion attempts on the NMCI's external boundaries.