The intelligence field, like many other industries, has had to make adjustments in dealing with COVID-19. Before the pandemic, there were many concerns about telecommuting in the Intelligence Community, and thus very little implementation. But faced with the need to go from limited remote operations to having a majority of employees working from home, the government responded quickly by fielding new technology while also modifying its on-prem working culture.
The telecommuting situation in government has gone well with positive reports across the board. Most of the pre-pandemic concerns over telecommuting have been addressed using new technology and more supportive policies. But some inefficiencies still exist. To talk about these issues, FedInsider interviewed experts from the Intelligence Community.
The experts’ talk ran the full gamut of telecommuting and remote workforce issues within intelligence. In the discussion, four main themes emerged as the most critical in supporting continued operations.
The Experts:
Dr. Catherine Marsh
Director, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)
Col. Wiley Barnes
Intelligence Surveillance & Reconnaissance (ISR), Strategy & Plans Division Chief, Air Force Headquarters
Christopher Page
Command Information Officer,
Naval Intelligence Activity (NIA)
Bob Osborn,
Chief Technology Officer,
Global Governments, ServiceNow
Agencies Must Make Sure Their VPNs Can Handle a Large Workforce
When COVID-19 hit, it forced many government employees to work exclusively from their homes. Almost every agency experienced heavy bandwidth issues that really stressed out their virtual private networks (VPNs), especially in the early days of the pandemic response. This caused many disruptions and slowdowns that hurt efficiency.
The government was able to quickly adjust and add bandwidth. But in order to continue achieving success, VPNs will need to be strengthened even more as remote operations continue.
“We’ve invested across DOD with Microsoft Teams, CVR [commercial virtual remote] and VPN capability,” Dr. Marsh said. “We essentially went from a few thousand users of virtual private networks to roughly 400,000 in a matter of weeks. And by making the workplace, at least from a virtual perspective, accessible to our people, we have accelerated very quickly and made that possible. Along with all the security that goes with those things.”
Dr. Marsh also pointed out that the online workforce in the Department of Defense works harder than most people in the general public realizes.
“I would offer that the technology is one thing, but being able to connect and being isolated in our homes puts a different type of pressure on the workforce,” Marsh said. “Being able to telework is not the vacation or the comfort that everybody makes it out to be.”
With employees being isolated and having no contact with work outside of their connection to the VPN, it’s important to ensure a stable and secure connection that is available at any time.
Intelligence Agencies Need to Share Information Quickly and Effectively
Although nobody planned for a situation where entire agency workforces would need to leave their offices, not be able to work together from a remote site and being required to social distance from their homes, the contingency planning that was in place did help.
“You know, each agency had strategic plans that outlined mobility,” Osborn said. The plans included “how you work from remote areas, how you take advantage of VPNs and other technologies, video teleconferencing, just like we’re doing today, utilizing this platform on Microsoft, which is a big partner of ServiceNow, in order to continue to work together to collaborate and get the job done.”
Communication in this new environment has emerged as one of the biggest components to ensure that intelligence agencies continue to function with remote employees. By providing a strong VPN network and stable tools for file sharing, the Intelligence Community loses little, if any, response time to high priority missions or sudden changes in mission needs.
The Intelligence Community Needs to Embrace Commercial Platforms
COVID-19 has highlighted the need for modernizing the technology used by the Intelligence Community in their daily operations. Without the rapid adoption and deployment of available commercial platforms, intelligence agencies would have been faced with unsurmountable problems in attempting to support a massive shift to teleworking.
“The biggest overarching theme, though, that I hope everyone takes away from this is that most of the advantage that we gain is what we bring in from the commercial industry,” Page says. “We don’t want to build our own tools for the most part. So the fact that we’re able to take advantage of a commercial platform makes all the difference in the world.”
By adopting cutting edge commercial products, the Intelligence Community can take advantage of the innovations already created in the private sector without having to reinvent everything.
Government Needs to Upgrade Tools for Sharing Classified Information
Obviously, not everything that the Intelligence Community shares is unclassified. The very nature of the work done by intelligence agencies means that much of the information being shared is going to be classified, secret or even top secret. With everyone working in designated offices, there is an infrastructure in place to prevent any classified information from leaking out. But that becomes a much more difficult task with employees working from home offices and kitchen tables.
However, it’s not an impossible task. And government scientists are hard at work trying to find workable solutions.
“One thing that’s really exciting is the potential of increasing our remote mobile security communications capability, at least at the secret level,” Col. Barnes says. “This is one of the things that is going to be a key enabler for operating in disbursed operation environments, and applying the fundamentals of mission command and joint domain command and control, which are operational principles and concepts that are being developed and applied throughout DOD and across the services.”
