CTOvision.com

Context for the CTO, CIO, CISO and Data Scientist

Home » Government » The Navy’s Disconnected Refresh Strategy: Delivering Yesterday’s IT Tomorrow

The Navy’s Disconnected Refresh Strategy: Delivering Yesterday’s IT Tomorrow

I’m going to spell out a challenge in hopes that someone fixes this (if you have a way to fix this issue you will be a hero to us all and probably make a billion dollars at the same time).

If you have been on a Navy ship recently then you know the ugly truth: there’s some amazingly OLD stuff out there! To fix that, the US Navy has made their Consolidated Afloat Network and Enterprise Services (CANES) program one of their highest priorities. CANES will replace all that really old stuff with new stuff that can handle some of today’s more capable applications.

Problem is… rolling CANES out to the fleet is taking forever. You can blame a lot of folks for this: the Navy for the slow contract award, Industry for the lengthy protest after the award was made, the designers for flaws that caused operational testing to falter, and the economy for cutting budgets just when installing CANES demanded steady funding. These delays have caused the fielding plans to be “re-phased”. In other words, this “new stuff” is going to be really OLD stuff by the time it gets there.

CANES runs on Microsoft’s Window’s XP operating system, which as we all know, is outdated and has been replaced by the more secure Windows 7 and more functional Windows 8. Although Navy is willing to pay Microsoft dearly for legacy support, pretty much every other DoD user is on Window’s 7 and many have moved to 8. And of course, Microsoft is already planning PAST Window’s 8.

Navy has never been good at aligning their software and hardware refresh cycles to any realistic industry standard. Because of the XP/7/8 disconnect, Navy is now reconsidering CANES for the littoral combat ships. Because of the budgeting issues, Navy has delayed their final operational capability until 2022.

Who knows what operating system Microsoft will be supporting then? Next generation C2 and ISR capabilities depend on fixing this strategic planning and budgeting flaw.

Also see:

Software developers now more valuable to companies than money: so what is a board to do?

A New AWS Snowball Edge Provides The Power Of The Cloud In Disconnected Environments

Navy continues to invest in innovation: Review their S&T efforts here

 

About ChrisScott

Chris Scott is an experienced department of defense enterprise technology professional and business executive with a long running track record of fielding proven technologies into large organizations. She interacts with senior DoD and IC officials and provides insights to our readers here. She publishes at CTOvision.com for OODA LLC.

Gain Decision Advantage With Innovative Enterprise Software

For over 10 years CTOvision has consistently provided strategic context on the nature of technology and how to best leverage it for your personal and business objectives.  We maintain the site in a way meant to help you find insights you need as fast as possible. To kick off a search use the search box […]

Gain Powerful Insights Into The Future With OODA Loop’s Technology Tracking

In a continuation of our journey to bring the best, most actionable technology content to enterprise decision-makers we have merged our research and reporting activities into the OODAloop.com site (both CTOvision.com and OODAloop.com are owned and operated by OODA LLC). CTOvision will focus only on one small niche, a vision for a technology enabled future. […]

Mitigating Advanced Threats with Scalable and Automated Malware Analysis: An interview of Chad Loeven and Mike Hylton

Mitigating Advanced Threats with Scalable and Automated Malware Analysis: An interview of Chad Loeven and Mike Hylton Scalable automated malware analysis has become a critical component of enterprise defense. When properly implemented it can be key to mitigating malware threats that otherwise bypass perimeter defenses. In this post we provide context enterprise architects and security […]

CTOvision and OODA: Big Changes Coming Soon

In a continuation of our journey to bring the best, most actionable technology content to enterprise decision-makers we are merging our research and reporting activities into the OODAloop.com site (both CTOvision.com and OODAloop.com are owned and operated by OODA LLC). This will give our community access to the same technology summaries we currently produce as […]

More Content

Cyber War

SciFi

Science Fiction Gadgets You Can Get Today

Technology is advancing pretty fast, at times influenced by the exciting world of Science Fiction. This video captures 10 of the tech developments first seen in SciFi that are available now. A key point of this, if you want to know what is in our future, watch more SciFi!  

Super Bowl Ads Indicate Big Businesses Think You Are Afraid of AI

Tom Loftus provided an insightful review of some of Super Bowl ads in the 4 Feb 2019 Wall Street Journal. Like AI parody in SNL, these ads really poked fun at computers: Seriously, did anyone catch the commercials? If the Super Bowl is the zeitgeist, then it is safe to say that America is not […]

HBO’s Westworld: The Man In Black is a special kind of Twitter user

HBO’s Westworld is a modern take on the Michael Crichton SciFi tale of a robotic amusement park. The HBO version has a new twist. The creators/writers were all exposed to years of Twitter, which has influenced every episode and the entire arch of two seasons of the show. Now that season two is wrapping up, […]