Company insight
Hardware-based cross- domain access solutions for OSINT
As the importance of open-source intelligence (OSINT) to military operations has become increasingly clear to Nato members and other armed forces around the world, so too have the risks of lax cybersecurity and the growing vulnerability of increasingly complex software systems. Garrison provides next generation cross-domain solutions that rely on hardware-based security, overcoming the many obstacles that have plagued traditional OSINT models.
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n the past few decades, conflicts like the war in Afghanistan and the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine have demonstrated the need to encourage a culture of information sharing among Nato members, as the amount of gatekeepers currently in place on the various systems involved make it difficult to openly share information with allies on the same network. The war in Ukraine has also served to highlight the modern landscape of warfare, captured in real time due to the widespread proliferation of the internet, social media and smartphones.
Alliances and partnerships between armed forces create a need for seamless coordination, communication and synchronicity, particularly as they move from traditional battlefields into the emerging space and cyber sectors. As a result, open-source intelligence (OSINT) has become a central part of military operations in these modern conflicts – but challenges remain over its implementation. For its part, Nato has been working to drive OSINT capabilities and information sharing across its member nations, looking to foster an improved ability to access and understand the information environment and to inform decision-making in the context of today’s hyper-connected global society. On 4 April 2022, Nato shared a number of goals in this area through a request for information (RFI) for OSINT services. The alliance plans to implement automation within the intelligence cycle to enable processes, activities and information management to compensate for limited manpower and to increase sustainability. Similarly, it is looking to create an
50 Users of Garrison’s cyber security solutions can access OSINT sources safely from their usual desktops.
integrated and coordinated working environment for real-time information sharing to produce fused actionable intelligence, while situational awareness and responsiveness will be aided through a synchronised understanding of the information environment.
Above all, Nato is seeking to provide deeper access to open-source information shared across the OSINT community and with other ‘communities of interest’. “At the moment, the key Nato goal is the necessity to enhance their interoperability capability,” says Dave ‘Flash’ Flanagan, VP Secure Consulting at Garrison, a leading cybersecurity company that specialises in providing hardware-based cross-domain access solutions. “The ability to interoperate with not only the defined partners that they have – the people that they know they have to work it – but [also] all those people that they don’t know they need to work with until the operation kicks off.”
Pathway to assurance Today’s armed forces rely on their ability to access, view and search for specific information in real-time in its native environment, and then transfer the required information to controlled or classified networks. Other cross-domain access and transfer solutions have existed in the past but, to date, the former have not been robust enough to connect to high- threat networks while the latter have been unable to handle the complexity of new and emerging data sets, demonstrating the need for innovation and development in this area.
Garrison was founded in 2014 by David Garfield and Henry Harrison, who set out to reinvent our approach to secure connectivity. Their pioneering hardware- based technology designed to isolate risky environments has enabled a step change in ways of working for both commercial and government/defence organisations.
Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
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