The Army is preparing to launch a platform that will allow vendors to get their software reviewed, accredited and deployed into Army environments more quickly.
Dubbed Project Gatekeeper, the effort will give companies the ability to “log in, submit their code and get the green check mark from our pipeline that says you are good to go,” Gabe Chiulli, acting Army chief information officer, told reporters Tuesday at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington.
The platform will run in an unclassified, isolated environment where vendors can provide their software and receive real-time feedback on vulnerabilities, compliance issues and other risks before bringing it onto the service’s secure networks.
“There is definitely a demarcation between this and our actual DoDIN toolset. It is actually built on the DoDIN network with the same controls that you would find in an [Impact Level 5] environment, it’s just separated, being made commercially accessible,” David Wright, the chief architect for the Army’s Software and Innovation Center, said.
“The idea here is that you’ve got a space to do this code, run these tools, understand, get your own assessments back about how your software looks, make corrections, provide new versions inside of that space and then submit for the ability to move it up into DoDIN network. This is a real pathway into DoDIN network without necessarily already having a presence in that space, ” he added.
It currently takes days or weeks for companies to transfer codes into the Army’s secure networks. Building the infrastructure needed to bring their software into the Army’s environment takes even longer.
“We really want to burn that down as much as we can,” David Markowitz, the Army’s chief data and analytics officer, said.
Project Gatekeeper, however, is meant to do more than speed up software approvals.
The Army does not have a standardized process for accessing commercial software before deploying it onto its networks.
“We have had to do a lot of weird janky things to get code into our environments,” Chiulli said.
Before, Markowitz said, it was up to every program manager. As a result, too often, Army organizations wouldn’t even engage with companies that don’t have a system owner but want to do business with the service until they obtained the “golden” Authority to Operate (ATO), Chiulli said.
Project Gatekeeper, however, is designed to lower that barrier to entry, allowing companies to submit their code for testing and review even if they don’t have an existing Army contract.
Project Gatekeeper is scheduled to go live on Oct. 23, but companies will still need their Common Access Cards (CAC) to log in until the Army completes its Login.gov integration.
“We are still working with the [General Services Administration] for the Login.gov integration. We’re looking at mid-November to have that integrated, at which point we will be able to make this actually commercially accessible,” Wright said.
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