DoD Cyber Exchange Turns One-Year-Old
By Kashia Simmons
Department of the Defense Cyber Exchange continues to expand offerings one-year after its launch as DOD’s one-stop portal for cyber information, policy, guidance and training May 10, 2019. Cyber.mil expanded the scope of what was primarily a cybersecurity portal to incorporate DoD resources that cover more than 40 different cyber content areas.
“It was a huge effort to curate all the content that was part of IASE, while developing an architecture that would expand in scope and services to support DoD cyber requirements, but we’ve done it and worked out the bugs. The platform is in a great place now to continue building upon,” said Laurel Lashley, program manager, DoD Cyber Exchange.
DoD Cyber Exchange provides a hosting platform for cyber information that is free for DoD organizations. These include guidance on Public Key Infrastructure/Public Key Enabling technologies, ports, protocols, and services management, and Security Technical Implementation Guides. There is still public-approved content available, however the site narrows its focus to meet the DOD’s specific needs.
“We’ve put in place a central, modern platform, available at both unclassified and secret classification levels that is free to host on, and it is proving its value,” Lashley said.
The site has been visited almost 2 million times with nearly 700,000 return-visits. The most popular content are the training catalogs and courses, STIGs and PKI/PKE content. The annual Cyber Awareness Challenge has more than 600,000 page views and DoD Mobility device training tops the list of most visited non-mandatory training resources.
The DoD Cyber Exchange program office is working with DoD Chief Information Office to incorporate the DoD Cyber Workforce Framework onto the portal over the next few months, while partnering with other cyber entities across the department.
“Cyber.mil has been an effective platform that the Defense Collaborations Services program management office has been utilizing to deliver relevant information in a timely manner on training, network configurations and policy to our customers and stakeholders,” said Sophie Johnson-Shapoval, DCS program manager.
Most recently, DCS has leveraged DoD Cyber Exchange to inform stakeholders of changes while scaling up its infrastructure due to the increased demand resulting from COVID-19, as well as its preparation to migrate to HTML5 technology.
“We are communicating the latest most relevant information on necessary network changes needed to avoid any service interruptions using the DCS page on cyber.mil. Big thanks to that team for providing a reliable and easy to use platform to communicate cybersecurity related and other information about DCS capabilities,” Johnson-Shapoval said.
DoD Cyber Exchange 101
The DoD Cyber Exchange provides one-stop access to Cyber information, policy, guidance and training for cyber professionals throughout the DoD. Formerly the Information Assurance Support Environment (IASE), some portions of the site are also available to the remainder of the Federal Government and the general public. These resources are provided to enable the user to comply with rules, regulations, best practices and federal laws. DISA is mandated to support and sustain the DoD Cyber Exchange as directed by DoDI 8500.01 and DODD 8140.01.
DoD Cyber Exchange History
The DoD Cyber Exchange began as the Information Assurance Support Environment (IASE) which was implemented in May 1997 on the Non-Secure Internet Protocol Router NETwork (NIPRNet) to provide a wide range of Information Assurance services. In October 1997 it was expanded to the Secret Internet Protocol Router NETwork (SIPRNet) and Releasable (REL) network to authorized DoD foreign coalition partners. To achieve mission and resource efficiencies IASE REL was decommissioned in March 2018; FVEY partners had accessibility to relevant cybersecurity guidance via IASE SIPR. The IASE Portals have been a mainstay in the information assurance and cyber communities, and has a usership of over five million annually to include DoD Components, the federal government and general public.
The IASE celebrated its 20th anniversaries in May 2017 and October 2017, and announced plans to modernized IASE Public, IASE NIPR and IASE SIPR to enhance the user interface and user experience; along with the “new look and feel” IASE was rebranded to the DoD Cyber Exchange.
Today’s “DoD Cyber Exchange Family of Portals” consists of:
- Public (https://public.cyber.mil), which is accessible to all Internet users,
- NIPR (https://cyber.mil), which requires Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) credentials for access to NIPRNet,
- SIPR (https://cyber.smil.mil), which can only be accessed from the SIPRNet.
DoD Cyber Exchange Who’s Who
The DoD Cyber Exchange is supported by a team of government and contractor staff in the Cyber Directorate at DISA. The DoD Cyber Exchange web team is charged with Operations Management, Content Management and Web Master Functions, Environment Development and Network Engineering.
The site’s content is provided by various Cyber subject matter area content owners, across the DoD through a change request and approval process coordinated and managed by the DoD Cyber Exchange web team. Our team is always looking for opportunities to grow and evolve the content offerings; if your federal government organization would like to join the DoD Cyber Exchange as a content owner, please contact the HelpDesk: dod.cyberexchange@mail.mil.