30 JUNE/JULY 2019 www.vanguardcanada.com
CYBER
BY NiCholas sChEuRkogEl
Enabling
Where
to invest
to find
addEd
valuE
D
efence of domestic or de-
ployed military missions
from cyber threats will re-
quire a significant invest-
ment to overcome challenges
in terms of tools, personnel, time, and
cultural change. This truth is largely un-
derstood across the defence community,
prompting investment into military cyber
capabilities as senior leadership across the 5
Eyes countries comes to realise the poten-
tial impacts and general challenges involved
in countering cyber-delivered effects or
cyber-enabled espionage. The increasingly
large volumes of financial and personnel re-
sources being allocated to defensive cyber
operations and IT security (DCO/ITS)
capabilities engenders hope amongst long-
time cyber operators who understand that
an insufficient investment would likely lead
to the loss of sustained cyber-superiority
within one's own systems.
While the levels of investment and sup-
port inspires hope, the potential to narrow-
ly focus on capabilities that can be directly
defined as being "hard cyber" presents risks
by causing artificial separation between
supporting and operational functions in
terms of funding, requirements, and au-
thorities. Any internal resource realloca-
tion taken from Information Technology
(IT) service delivery organizations to cre-
ate "new" cyber investment could reduce
available support from this organizations.
The allocation of funding to cyber opera-
tions capabilities without accounting for
the resulting pressures upon support func-
tions could also lead to sustainability issues.
Creating authority and responsibility silos
could also degrade how DCO/ITS and
support functions make integrated plans.
This article will discuss key elements of the
relationship between DCO/ITS capabili-
ties and how IT systems are managed, and
provide perspectives on how they can be
leveraged together to significantly advance
an organization's overall cyber operational
capability.
Master Corporal Marty Stride preforms maintenance on the satiate
system at the High Arctic Data Communications Centre. Photo: DND
