COP Tool Boosts Network Awareness
Written by Harrison Donnelly
For those planning a network-dependent military operation—or scheduling needed network maintenance or responding to an unexpected outage—however, the communication of needed information has not been so easy. It may take a blizzard of e-mails and phone calls to ensure that everyone is up to date on the status of the network and its impact on vital missions.
To make that kind of essential information sharing more efficient, EDS, an HP company, which operates the Navy Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), recently developed a Navy network common operating picture (COP) tool to automate the process, protect the most vital missions and ensure that all users understand how they will be affected by what goes on in the network.
“About eight months ago, a large problem was identified in that, although we were operating and executing changes well from an enterprise perspective, the individual commands and users had issues where they were unable to understand their operational impact from a given outage or a scheduled change,” said EDS network engineer Lance Arnold. “For example, if we were planning to take down a particular piece of network infrastructure, a large group of users serviced by the device would have even gotten the notification that something was happening. But they were unable to translate the outage from an infrastructure level to what that meant to the individual commands and users.
“What the COP is designed to do at a high level, and what we’re piloting here, is providing information about those outages and changes, specifically tying them back to where there could be an operational impact, and allowing commands and users to react directly to that,” he said.
The key, Arnold continued, is to be able to translate the impact of network operations—routine maintenance or responding to an information assurance vulnerability alert, for example— into terms that are meaningful to users.
“Say there’s a new vulnerability that has been identified, and we need to push a patch to individual computers to respond to that vulnerability,” he said. “We’re requesting to do it at a particular time, and we go through the process and get everyone’s approval. Then at the last minute they realize that the operational impact of being without their e-mail during this time is critical, and they can’t afford to be without it, so we need to reschedule it or come up with a mitigation plan if it can’t be rescheduled.
OVERSIGHT AID
While it has been in operation for only a few months, the network COP has already produced marked improvements in the eyes of Commander Everett Hayes, the Navy Global Network Operations Center officer responsible for oversight of the Navy portion of the NMCI.
“The COP tool starts with what we call a user-defined operational picture [UDOP], which is where a command can specify who their high-value users are,” Hayes said. “For instance, in a command like Pacific Fleet, there are hundreds or thousands of users in the environment. But they may have 50 people or seats that have an operational requirement that requires a scrutiny above what the normal person would see. So they define who those people are—maybe by position, or perhaps a specific person.
“In the past, it was very difficult for us to provide the oversight that would say that this particular maintenance was going to affect a particular person at this time. But with the COP tool and the UDOP, when we say that maintenance is going to happen on a specific switch or e-mail server, the algorithms and databases that EDS has, and what they programmed into the COP tool, will say that it’s going to affect a certain person,” Hayes said.
“That makes it easier for the command to make an educated operational decision on whether or not that outage can occur to that person at that time,” he continued. “Also, it makes it easier for us to say to EDS that, in order for us to do this maintenance, we’re going to have to mitigate it by moving that particular person to another e-mail server so they won’t experience an outage during that time period.
“From my perspective, the biggest utility that we get from the COP tool is that we can see at a moment’s notice who the command has determined to be the most important users, and we can see the impact of a planned or unplanned outage in any element of the network,” Hayes said. ♦