by Mark Everett Hall

A panel from the Department of Defense (DoD) told an audience of communications vendors and enterprise users at Management World Americas that the development of security standards was not just good for creating “information dominance” for U.S. war fighters, but it was good for business as well.

“Our problem set mirrors what goes on in the commercial world,” said Henry Sienkiewicz, technology program director for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA).

Panelists said they face many of the same technology and business-process problems that exist for many large organizations today. For example, Sienkiewicz pointed to DISA’s responsibilities for handling the communications and IT systems for the Pentagon’s healthcare operations, which means it must comply with provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the U.S.

Because DISA supplies communications, computing, storage, applications development, data security and other common IT-related services, Randy Tanaka, technical director at DISA, said that his group functions like a “combination of Disney, Qwest, Amazon and McAfee” does to the industry.

However, panelists acknowledged that the DoD’s security profile is much more stringent than the average business. Still, by pushing vendors within TM Forum to adopt security standards that meet the Pentagon’s requirements in their hardware and software, all enterprises will benefit by being able to implement more rigorous data protection in their data centers.

Lt. Colonel Joe Wolfkiel, director computer network defense research and technology management office, said one area where TM Forum can help the military’s data security needs is to develop and then comply with taxonomy standards in both communications and computing systems and software. For example, he said, current sensors from different vendors on DoD networks cannot communicate among themselves when identifying and tracking security events.

“There’s no standard way to share data among tools,” he said.

According to Manuel Hermosilla, DISA’s chief of the operational support systems division, standards would not only help keep DoD costs down, but could open opportunities with vendors who comply with accepted standards.

Hermosilla said standards and specifications that flow from TM Forum will lead to lower integration costs and greater scalability.

Standards will help America’s war fighters, he said, “by getting the right information to the right people at the right time.”