The military is producing ever-larger amounts of valuable data from embedded systems at the edge. Now it needs more effective ways to share, understand, and act on that data – at or near the user and as close as possible to real time. By leveraging available technologies like containerization and tools to manage them, warfighters have the opportunity to make faster, smarter decisions where and when they’re needed to help achieve battlespace dominance.

By Mike Epley, Red Hat

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) was already headed toward a completely perimeter-less security environment before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Now, the agency has gone full-fledged into a virtually wide-open landscape where physical constraints that used to exist have been largely eradicated, and new types of threats against its workforce, tools, supply chains, and operations abound.

By Mike Epley

The ability to collect and analyze data from radar; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); electronic warfare (EW); and other sensors at the edge can offer the U.S. military a decisive advantage on the battlefield. Yet resource and operational constraints continue to stand in the way. Applying cloud-native models can help overcome these constraints and improve decision-making while in theater.

Updating and patching security vulner­abilities to limit the attack surface for the military’s embedded systems – especially legacy ones – can be a daunting task.

It is critical to be able to verify the integrity of systems used in military and other applications to ensure that they have not been modified or corrupted. It is of course best to prevent a system from being tampered with. If this can't be done, it is vital to detect tampering. In many cases it is better to prevent a system from operating at all if you can't be sure it hasn't been modified. In all cases it is vital to protect information on the system and especially critical secrets like crypto keys.