A provision in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act requires the Defense Department to perform an operational test and evaluation procedure to ensure the Joint Regional Security Stacks system will work to protect DoD networks from cyber attacks, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.
President Barack Obama on Friday signed into law the bill that contains such a requirement for JRSS, a $1.6 billion shared platform of 12 regionalized cyber centers implemented under the Joint Information Environment.
Jared Serbu writes DoD leaders could bypass the OT&E requirement if they can certify to Congress that JRSS is critical to national security and performs its functions.
DoD’s inspector general said in its annual oversight plan that it plans to start a series of initial audits to evaluate whether the implementation of the JRSS system works to reduce the Pentagon’s exposure to external and internal cyber threats, according to the report.
The U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Army have started to migrate their computer networks and plan to move the rest of their systems to JRSS in 2017, Serbu reports.
The U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy plan to begin the migration process for their large enterprise networks to the JRSS system’s 2.0 version in 2018, the report added.
