Military deploying mobile devices

The Department of Defense recently announced it will begin to distribute mobile devices to military officials and other employees, and the department is now exploring ways to keep confidential U.S. government information secure through mobile device management.

Government Security News reported that the DOD is considering the security, authentication and logistics of managing the smartphones and tablets that are planned to be deployed by researching third-party companies that specialize in MDM. Like many other companies around the country, the DOD needs to secure multiple degrees of access to private files, which poses a challenge.

Government officials are confident they can keep high levels of security on mobile devices running on Android operating systems without compromising the safety of the military and families across the United States, the source reported.

The military is looking at identity verification techniques, including biometrics, which will make mobile devices safer.

“The services are really pushing [mobility] because they want to be able reduce their costs,” Greg Youst, mobility lead for interdisciplinary systems at the Defense Information Systems Agency's Office of the Chief Technology Officer, said at an enterprise mobility conference in December. “They want to be able to hand a soldier a tablet or a smartphone and take the PC and a wide percentage of the phones off the desk to try to save on cost.”

The DISA is working with the National Security Agency and the National Institute of Technology and Standards to develop methods for large-scale mobile device deployments in the military.

Mobility-as-a-service is one route to securing information, led by the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare laboratory, which is determining how to give soldiers access to unclassified information. All of the services provided in mobility-as-a-service work within a structured cloud-based model. The model is similar to that of President Obama's BlackBerry, which was modified to allow him to safely access information from his mobile device.

“What we’re bringing to the table as a solution will allow users to authenticate to an unclassified network in their own manner, with their own devices,” Bill Edwards, integrated project team lead at SPAWAR's Atlantic System Center, said to the source.

According to 2010 figures from the CTIA-Wireless Association, 91 percent of Americans use a cellphone, which is about 285 million people. With so many users of cellphones being potential victims of hackers looking for loopholes to access information in mobile devices, security software is a necessity, especially for the U.S. military and other organizations dealing with large volumes of sensitive information.