US Army Cyber Command, ECMA Deepen Cloud Security Ties

Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, head of U.S. Army Cyber Command, signed a memorandum of agreement in April with David Markowitz, acting chief information officer of the Department of the Army, to strengthen collaboration between ARCYBER and the Enterprise Cloud Management Agency.

Officials said the move advances the service branch’s convergence goals for the Unified Network Plan.

The agreement’s expected outcome is to enable ARCYBER to oversee defense operations for the Army’s cloud environment and provide more resources, such as cyber intelligence, to ECMA. According to Barrett, the partnership enables both organizations to access each other’s data and insights.

She explained that ARCYBER has an enforceable authority to instruct Army organizations on vulnerabilities and that ECMA was outside the scope of that power until the agreement was signed, Signal Magazine reported.

The Army is also making efforts to share cloud knowledge with the other service branches. According to ECMA Deputy Director Gregg Judge, experts from the Army, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force are communicating on disparate databases and best practices.