• Constraints imposed by an austere and remote operating environment. 
• Increased cognitive load on individuals conducting operations due to exponential growth in the volume, veracity, and velocity of data. 
• Survivability and the need for distributed nodal command and control.

The dilemma posed here is whether technological advancements inadvertently compromise decision-making abilities due to the heightened cognitive burden on users. 

Decisive action powered by AI 

Speed, precision, and data are critical on the modern digital battlefield. Human-machine teaming allows modern soldiers to work with AI as their digital agents, using natural language or voice commands through military radios. This hands-free interaction improves situational awareness and enhances decision-making by combining AI’s analytical power with human intuition and judgment.  

Using AI and machine learning on missions will become critical to effective command and control environments. Language models have evolved to create and use enterprise-level knowledge bases, integrating external data for more complex interactions. This advancement has significant effects for mission capabilities, with early applications in: 

• Voice transcription and translation—We have already seen that when paired with Push-To-Talk (PTT) voice radios, digital audio voice streams can be captured for real-time transcription, translations, and augmentation with other sources of data. 
• Robotic command and control orchestration—With an intent to release operators from the need to operate these systems manually, we can not only free human resources to concentrate on the specifics of their mission but also reduce the force protection overhead that is required to keep operators safe. 
• Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) analysis—Working with multiple agents and multimodal sensors for defense use cases, we can help increase the accuracy and range of surveillance and provide a multilayered approach to detection and action. 
• Querying Battle Management Systems—We not only provide the capability to access information in a humanistic way, at the point of need, we also reduce the intense staff effort associated with briefing and analysis of data—the AI agents can take on the manual load, freeing up the human cognitive load to enable better and faster decision making. 

Agentic AI explained 

So, what do we understand about the advancement and application of Agentic AI? When discussing Agentic AI, it’s crucial to highlight the characteristics that distinguish an agent from tools like ChatGPT or traditional digital assistants we’ve seen in office settings. There are five key nonlinear elements that define agentic capabilities: 

• Planning—Instead of diving right into a task, an AI agent pauses and plans the series of steps required. This structured approach prevents errors, as we often see in traditional language model implementations with robots. 
• Reflection—Current models like ChatGPT provide answers but don’t validate them, as they lack a built-in ‘reflection’ capability. The ability to ‘reflect’ and ensure completeness is crucial to confirm that tasks are executed properly and are relevant to each subsequent step in the Agentic AI lifecycle. 
• Use of tools—When the AI agent encounters a step it can’t perform, it checks its manual for a corresponding tool, gathers needed information, executes the task, and processes the response. This is crucial for proprietary industry capabilities, allowing handoffs to external sources. 
• Collaboration—Where the human or agents work collaboratively on collective tasks. This is important for two reasons: creating clear boundaries and ensuring agents are task-specific.  
• Memory—This cycle is further powered by memory, where the agent retains and can recall prior inputs, actions, and outcomes. With this memory, the agent learns from past decisions, allowing it to improve future actions and refine its planning and reflection. 

Traditional non-agentic AI workflows vs agentic AI workflows 

Collectively, these five characteristics form a framework known as the REACT framework (Reasoning and Action). Reasoning involves planning and reflection, while action is about the execution.  

The key difference between traditional non-agentic AI workflows, often seen in zero-shot prompts, and the more advanced, agentic workflows we’ve been discussing can be seen in the diagram below. 

In practice, AI agents can be seamlessly integrated into an organization’s workflow, especially for field operators. This will result in more efficient missions, quicker responses, and a trusted pairing of humans and machines. Additionally, it will allow warfighters to focus on tactical operations while AI handles data processing and situational analysis in the background.  

This is where digital agents can come into play. Digital agents that allow operators, particularly those in forward positions, to delegate specific tasks using natural language. Incorporating these agents into your workflow can help revolutionize how your organization handles complex operations. By offering an intuitive interface, robust performance under duress, and the ability to manage tedious tasks, these agents ensure that operators at the tactical edge can focus on what really matters—making critical decisions in dynamic environments. 

Microsoft AI principles 

Microsoft is committed to advancing AI through principles that put people first. 

We put our responsible AI principles into practice through the AI, Ethics, and Effects in Engineering and Research (Aether) Committee, as well as our Office of Responsible AI (ORA). The Aether Committee advises our leadership on the challenges and opportunities presented by AI innovations. ORA sets our rules and governance processes, working closely with teams across the company to support the effort. 

Microsoft AI serves to enhance human capabilities, not replace them. It’s designed to embody principles such as fairness, inclusivity, reliability and safety, transparency, privacy and security, and accountability. By using AI to optimize administrative functions and services, stakeholders can focus on what matters most: human-centered design, decision-making, and empathy.  

Implement emerging technologies strategically 

Defense decision makers should consider not just what AI can do, but what it should do to innovate in a reliable and trusted way. It’s critical to understand the components of a holistic approach to AI that will help agencies turn meaningful innovation into actionable results that will benefit society.  To learn more contact your Microsoft Defense and Intelligence representative today, or engage with the following Microsoft resources:  

• Microsoft Agentic Agents.
• AutoGen Update: Complex Tasks and Agents.
• Copilot agent builder.  

The post Empowering defense operations with Microsoft AI appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

The underwater and littoral environments remain critical to a nation’s economic interests and its ability to exploit marine resources. In addition to the traditional resources, energy production from water and wind are vital resources carried by subsea cables. These cables provide high-speed, low-cost, and reliable connections, with more than 400 cables spanning over 1.3 million kilometers across the world. They are essential for global data transmission, including the financial and digital economies.

In October 2020, NATO Defense Ministers discussed the threat to critical subsea infrastructure posed by increasing state actor capability and aggression.¹ Subsea protection was renewed in 2022 by the United Kingdom Defence Chief, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, and is a current priority by NATO in the Digital Ocean initiative.² Subsea protection is a subject of debate across the globe spanning the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, and European seas, which experience highly congested sea-borne infrastructures.³ Furthermore, in 2024, NATO is exploring the “Digital Ocean” as a pioneering initiative for maritime situational awareness.⁴

Protection of the subsea domain relies on allied defense organizations and asset operators developing and deploying innovative solutions and data-driven insights to enhance situational awareness, communication, and decision-making capabilities. However, this is a complex environment, and several technical and operational challenges need to be addressed, such as high latency, low bandwidth, power consumption, security, data quality, multi-domain sensor integration, and processing at the edge.

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Strategies can be implemented to address these challenges by using industry-leading capabilities and integrating them with hyperscale data fabric. This collaborative effort involves working closely with allied defense organizations, coast guard, government entities, and asset operators to determine innovative ways of deploying a secure and intelligent digital backbone to safeguard critical underwater infrastructure.

Meeting the challenge

Fundamentally, meeting the operational information demands requires the ingestion, analysis, distribution, and visualization of data across the subsea domain:

• Data ingestion: Securely and reliably collect, store, and process data from various sources, such as sensors, devices, satellites, and surface links. Additionally, this may require technology and infrastructure that can operate disconnected for extended periods and with an innate ability to conduct safe, secure syncing when connectivity becomes available.
• Data analysis: Applying artificial techniques, such as anomaly detection, classification, and prediction, to data to generate actionable insights and intelligence. This may require those AI and machine learning models to be developed using high-performance computing and packaged for inferencing at the extreme edge, with processes that allow efficient deployment and an effective feedback loop.
• Data distribution: Sharing and exchanging data across different domains, platforms, and stakeholders in a timely and efficient manner while respecting data governance, together with the ability to support interoperability standards (such as Standardization Agreements [STANAGs], CATL, and others) and also meeting the challenge of denied, degraded, intermitted, and latent network requirements while maintaining security policies.
• Data visualization: Presenting and displaying the data and insights in a user-friendly and intuitive way, such as dashboards, holographic displays, geospatial data infrastructure, and charts to support situational awareness and enhance decision-making.

Meeting the challenges is a significant undertaking and requires a flexible, modular, and interoperable solution. That solution must support and adapt to the dynamic and complex underwater environment, while meeting security requirements and the priorities of allied defense organizations and industry partners.

Therefore, we aim to support the construction of a common reference architecture for a test and development environment based on the principles of a digital software factory. This will enable the implementation and underpin the sustainment of a machine learning ecosystem for an interoperable, underwater infrastructure in support for continuous innovation at speed and at scale.

A proposed solution

At the core, there are four principles of design to help ensure security and intelligence in an underwater environment. They include:

1. Hyperscale compute at scale in the cloud and at the edge to enable secure information operations that extends cloud services to the edge, providing a trusted collaboration environment for a wide range of infrastructure partners. The provision of a hyperscale environment also meets the ongoing needs for security, scalability, and reliability.
2. Secure data exchange to support a Zero Trust, multi-domain network of asset operations and sensors, while maintaining security and data controls. A secure data exchange capability also meets the operational requirements for trusted data and information sharing across a complex ecosystem of agencies and public and private infrastructures within a multi-dimensional legal framework that cross the boundaries of territorial waters.
3. Ubiquitous connectivity through terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks, leveraging current infrastructures at scale and meeting the asymmetric growth in data volume and near real-time data insights. Furthermore, we envision the (future) application of private 5G and satellite backhaul connecting sensors at subsurface, surface, and above surface that enhance risk management and reduce mitigation at sea.
4. Assurance and risk management services for the maritime and energy sectors combining the requirement for public and private partnerships in current and future energy infrastructure.

Applying these design principles provides a comprehensive solution for a secure undersea digital backbone. It will:

• Enable enhanced situational awareness for all parties across the operating landscape.
• Facilitate data sharing and exchange across domains, platforms, and stakeholders.
• Ensure security and reliability across the infrastructure and environment.
• Optimize the performance and operations through the provision of undersea digital services for the maritime, energy, and defense sectors.  

Ultimately, delivering enhanced human-machine teaming in military and non-military operations provides the backbone for computational decision-assist capabilities that are data-driven, trusted, and transparent.

Enhance maritime operations with Microsoft solutions

The domain of critical underwater infrastructure is a strategic and challenging environment that requires cloud-enabled innovative and interoperable capabilities to enhance data and network management for undersea operations.

Microsoft for Defense and Intelligence believes this approach will provide a comprehensive and flexible solution that delivers significant benefits for situational awareness, communication, collaboration, security, reliability, performance, as well as efficiency of undersea operations and the critical infrastructure situated in the maritime environment.

For more insights, read the “Transforming Sub-Surface Operations with Data-Driven Decision Support” whitepaper.

Empowering militaries. Improving operations. Protecting national security.

¹NATO seeks ways of protecting undersea cables from Russian attacks, Euractiv.

²Chief of Defence Staff: Russia cutting underwater cables could be ‘an act of war, Froces.net.

³Australia must do more to secure the cables that connect the Indo-Pacific, ASPI Strategist.

⁴NATO Digital Ocean Industry Symposium, NATO.

The post Microsoft and partners: Securing the digital subsea environment through innovation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

“Command and control is essential for decision-making. But in the end, that has to include some combination of AI, machine learning, and all the other adaptations technologically, alongside in parallel with an exquisite timing with a human ability, and the human value of making decisions in that cycle. So, I think that the digital world has changed command and control, but the objective of that is to make really good decisions.”

The current geopolitical environment is entering a heightened phase of competition with adversaries looking to exploit technological advancements to get ahead. Over recent decades, defense and intelligence organizations have seen unparalleled and constant change, as they respond to the emergence of a new and transforming world. The rapid and disruptive advance of technology may be at the forefront of change (particularly as accelerated by COVID-19), but the digital transformation of defense organizations should also be viewed through the lens of the changing geopolitical situation and evolution of warfare. This evolution is most impacted especially across the landscapes of global threats, regional instability, emergency response, hybrid warfare, cyberattacks, and grey zone activities designed to disrupt both military and industrial infrastructure. 

As we delve deeper into technological advancements, the Microsoft Defense and Intelligence team understands that AI stands at the forefront, driving innovation and transformation across various sectors. It, along with the growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities, is driving maturity in sensors, data gathering, and analysis and visualization—all of which can be delivered at the tactical edge for deployed forces. Further, cloud computing capabilities and sophisticated simulation techniques are being fused with new and evolving communications technologies, such as 5G and space-based capabilities. Together, these technologies aren’t just a trend, but a significant stride towards a technologically advanced defense system that can revolutionize mission planning, rehearsal, and execution.  

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The technological advantage 

An increasing race for technological advantage means allied nations must consider how they can increase their tech intensity,¹ to provide “digital advantage” over their competition. For defense and intelligence, achieving “digital advantage” is key as it will cement the bedrock for the provision of information superiority on mission and provide the foundation for accelerating the design, build, and transition into service of new and innovative capabilities. This will speed the capability lifecycle and also provide simulation technologies for optimizing force generation activities.  

To achieve this, these organizations will need to compete continuously across all military domains—adopting better, smarter, and more flexible operations. The adoption, continuous innovation, and democratization of technology will be critical to enabling this response. It will also require a growing reliance on sharing data across a secure, singular, resilient, and adaptive digital continuum, and exploiting that data through contemporary developments that enhance human and machine teaming. 

Move to hyperscale with help from Microsoft

This need to continuously innovate and transform requires defense and intelligence organizations to move to hyperscale with urgency. The necessary transformation can’t be delivered from current siloed and technologically constrained Information and Communication Technology (ICT) environments. Therefore, the answer to this dilemma is through the five imperatives that will increase your digital advantage.  

1. Innovation and speed to value: Defense organizations need to stay at the forefront of technological advancements to enhance defense system capabilities and innovation and stay ahead of their adversaries, leveraging vast digital data for invaluable insights crucial to national security. Moving from on-premise to hyperscale cloud will be a pivotal catalyst in supporting innovation as it enables the rapid adoption of new and innovative developments from industry, facilitates the efficient processing and analysis of immense datasets, and also offers a scalable and agile platform that will adapt to the evolving technological landscape. The future of innovation is the cloud. 
2. Connectivity and interoperability: Military organizations demand seamless global collaboration, necessitating connectivity from headquarters to the tactical edge. Microsoft Azure’s worldwide network—distributed across multiple regions—forms the backbone of its cloud services. It enables low-latency access for global application deployment and management, ideal for achieving connectivity and interoperability across diverse defense forces.¹ 
3. Security: Air-gapped environments face growing vulnerabilities—particularly from insider threats and private clouds—even at an enterprise scale, typically lack the robust network security systems and monitoring capabilities found in hyperscale security operations centers (SOCs). In the past year, military organizations have faced a surge in targeted cyberattacks, emphasizing the need for AI-driven defenses with access to hyperscale data. Microsoft’s exceptional AI supercomputer processes an extraordinary 750 million security signals per second, enabling rapid real-time threat analysis and responses that surpass the capabilities of private networks. 
4. Computational power: Unconstrained access to computational power is crucial for real-time data collection, fusion, and analysis—addressing immense computational needs beyond what is realistically available on-premise and essential for informed decision-making in military simulations and strategic planning. To maintain a digital advantage, defense organizations must adopt hyperscale solutions like Microsoft Azure, which efficiently meet growing data demands and enhance computing resources without the constraints of on-premise requirements and costs. 
5. Reliability and resilience: Reliability and resilience considerations for defense must address both kinetic and cyber-attacks, with hyperscale cloud providing comprehensive cyber protection against diverse threats, setting a benchmark for collective defense that requires a unified approach involving allies, partners, and agencies. Microsoft Azure—as the first ISO-22301 certified hyperscale cloud provider—showcases its ability to prevent, mitigate, respond to, and recover from incidents. It offers a secure haven for a nation’s critical data during conflicts, ensuring a level of resiliency unavailable with on-premise solutions and preventing potential disruptions to national operations. The impact of data loss or compromise in an on-premise system during a kinetic attack underscores the critical importance of secure cloud solutions for maintaining a nation’s smooth functioning. 

Increasingly, defense organizations are reliant on the global defense industrial base to maintain digital advantage and industry is well placed to respond, with access to the resource and innovative culture required to deliver. However, this cannot be done by industry alone, defense organizations also need to come to the table with a desire to unburden its procurement constraints, which will aid greater innovation, and to take on the task of vigorously reviewing its policy stances and their place (or not) in a modern digital world, which can often stifle progress.

Resources to help with your transition

To learn more about how the Microsoft Defense and Intelligence team can help in your transition to hyperscale cloud and hear from former defense leaders, we encourage you to visit the Public Sector Center of Expertise and listen to: 

• Digital Transformation in Modern Military Operations, insights from General Bob Brown.
• Technology Trends and Decision Advantage in Defense with retired Vice Admiral Ann E. Rondeau.
• Military Lessons on Cyberdefense with retired Major General Dr. Marcus Thompson.

Or you can get in touch with your Microsoft sales representative or technology partner. 

¹ CSIS, Seven Critical Technologies For Winning The Next War, April 2023.

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Isn’t the “metaverse” just a virtual reality gaming environment?

Contrary to popular belief, the metaverse is not merely a virtual reality gaming environment, akin to the virtual holodeck in science fiction. While virtual reality certainly has a place in the metaverse, the metaverse goes beyond the visualization layer, transcending into an interconnected, persistent virtual environment for immersive interaction with data and AI.  

Microsoft is seeing three distinct domains of the metaverse: 

1. The consumer metaverse: This is the one most of us are familiar with, underpinned by social technologies—like bitcoin, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain, and gaming—the consumer metaverse is focused on enhancing the entertainment and well-being experiences of individuals. 
2. The commercial metaverse (or enterprise metaverse in public sector scenarios): Where employees communicate and collaborate as they work toward achieving organizational goals. Microsoft cloud-based modern work technologies, such as immersive spaces for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Mesh, are examples of the type of innovative technologies that are gaining rise because they can be accessed on PCs or virtual reality and mixed reality headsets and increase connection, build social capital in the workplace, and support collaboration for hybrid and remote workers all over the globe. 
3. The industrial metaverse: This is perhaps best positioned for defense industry use. This is where we see people and AI working together to design, develop, model, and optimize defense products, processes, and operations with real-time data in context. Furthermore, technological advances are modernizing the value chain with digital context to improve engineering and manufacturing processes, accelerate remote training, and automate tasks reducing the cognitive burden of humans.  

Through the application of these distinct domains, and the intersection points across the consumer, commercial, and industrial spheres, we are likely to unlock new opportunities that could inevitably play a significant role in extending individual metaverse capabilities. 

Unlocking the potential for defense 

The concept of the metaverse presents an exciting opportunity for the defense industry to revolutionize its operations, capabilities, and preparedness. To realize this opportunity, it is important for the defense industry to recognize that, at its core, the metaverse offers the ability to break down physical barriers and greatly enhance decision support through the confluence of technologies that connect and integrate, store, model, analyze, visualize, and interact with the vast data resources that defense accesses.  

At Microsoft, we are seeing two distinct lines of development for the defense metaverse emerge. The first extends from engineering and manufacturing, and is focused on capability development, where we envisage defense unlocking:  

• Modernized defense capability lifecycle methods and processes.
• Improved engineering and manufacturing processes, tools, and methodologies.
• Data-oriented approaches enable greater visibility and more timely insights into physical and digital assets and systems.  

Here, we see the industrial metaverse offering significant improvements over traditional engineering and manufacturing methods by facilitating a new way of engaging with designs, products, and systems through immersive and interactive experiences and digital models. This immersive experience can help people make sense of large quantities of information quickly, enhance design and engineering decision-making, reduce production and manufacturing costs, and provide direct feedback across the capability lifecycle from design and build through to whole-life sustainment. Modeling and simulation capabilities expand these insights by providing engineers, manufacturers, and capability managers with the ability to experience, experiment, and trial a near-infinite number of hypothetical scenarios and input conditions before ever going to physical production. 

For example, through virtual prototyping, engineers and designers can collaborate in real-time, rapidly iterating on designs and testing digital capabilities before any physical production. This can significantly reduce costs, minimize errors, and shrink time-to-market for cutting-edge defense capabilities—thereby, getting them in the hands of end users under much more rapid timescales, and incorporating their feedback throughout the entire capability lifecycle. 

Advancing defense missions 

The second line of emerging industrial metaverse development is focused on the defense mission itself. Here, we start with the premise that a common operating picture (COP) can be represented as a digital twin of the battlespace and that the technologies available can enhance interaction with the digitally twinned battlespace, provide an immersive experience, and enhance decision support. We see a clear alignment between this and the ‘sensor to effector’ process, with the Industrial Metaverse for Missions incorporating:  

• Internet of Military Things (IoMT) and other sensors (such as intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance devices) gather information from the physical world and physical platforms and assets.
• Digital network technologies like edge computing, 5G, mesh radios, and satellite connectivity, enable this data to be processed from edge-to-cloud and transmitted around the battlespace and to headquarters, at speed. 
• Cloud infrastructure and high-performance computing (HPC) can be used to process and synthesize the data at scale to build and leverage complex machine learning models and algorithms.
• AI, which is used to reason over complex simulations, perform analytical processing, and enable the automation of routine tasks.
• Delivery of results in a user-friendly and accessible format, such as through advanced visualization techniques and mixed reality, thereby supporting immersive visualization and enhanced situational awareness.

All of these can be subject to, or utilized within, a closed feedback loop that enables the measurement of the impact of the effect as part of simulation and analysis in future cycles.

There are, of course, many other scenarios and use cases being explored for the industrial metaverse in the defense and intelligence industry. These use cases will continue to gain momentum, particularly as AI techniques continue to improve and become more ubiquitous in their deployment, and as augmented, mixed, and virtual reality technologies continue to advance in both capability and usability, for example: 

• Advancing training platforms: The industrial metaverse can serve as an advanced training platform for defense and intelligence personnel and for the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) workforce. Immersive simulations, such as the Squad Immersive Virtual Trainer in development by the United States Army, can replicate realistic combat scenarios, allowing troops to enhance their skills, decision-making, and teamwork without the risks associated with live exercises and leading to a more agile and capable military force. We are also seeing the development of complex virtual environments imbued with computational modeling, which will see a myriad of applications across wargaming and strategic planning. 
• Securing supply chains: We are also witnessing an increasing move towards the adoption of the industrial metaverse in manufacturing, including by DIB partners. In defense organizations, managing and securing supply chains is a complex task, involving numerous stakeholders, nodes, and methods. By leveraging DIB metaverse capabilities for supply chain coordination and management, supply chain managers can monitor and optimize processes, ensuring timely deliveries of crucial resources and equipment, and identifying potential vulnerabilities or bottlenecks before they occur. 
• Bolstering cyber resilience: In an age where cyber threats are ever-evolving, the metaverse can also serve as a training ground for cybersecurity specialists, bolstering cyber resilience for defense. By modeling networks and simulating cyber-attack and response scenarios, cybersecurity professionals can hone their skills, strengthen network defenses, and develop robust countermeasures. We are seeing forward-thinking militaries and defense organizations increasingly deploying cyber ranges for purposes of immersive cyber skilling, and the inclusion of industrial metaverse capabilities has the power to further enhance cyber preparedness at scale.     

Furthermore, the industrial metaverse transcends geographical boundaries, enabling seamless collaboration among defense organizations worldwide—and across public and private partnerships. Experts, strategists, policymakers, and industry members from different countries and organizations can come together virtually to share insights, exchange intelligence, and coordinate efforts, thereby fostering international cooperation and joint missions—and joint success. 

Embrace the metaverse and its capabilities 

Forward-thinking defense forces are already taking the plunge into industrial metaverse capabilities and are recognizing that full benefits can only be realized through a collective adoption of the technologies available. They also see the need for HPC both at hyperscale and extended to the edge. This requires a re-thinking of where on-premises capability is and is not appropriate, and how hybrid environments can assist in exploiting the HPC and AI services available at hyperscale whilst maintaining operational security of the most sensitive data. Recent operational examples have also highlighted the need for greater survivability through dispersed nodal command and control at all echelons, lending toward a greater need for edge capabilities and less reliance on vulnerable on-premises infrastructure. As technology advances at an even more rapid pace, the dilemma for defense organizations wishing to embrace new technologies will grow—the need for digital transformation has never been more apparent and requires foundational action now.    

Furthermore, as the industrial metaverse continues to evolve and mature, it is essential to separate fact from fiction and seek to understand the profound opportunities and implications beyond the gaming and entertainment industries. The defense industry has the opportunity, now, to embrace the metaverse and leverage its capabilities to enhance innovation, collaboration, security, and preparedness. By embracing this concept and the underlying technologies early, the defense sector can step boldly into the future, safeguarding nations and fulfilling its critical mission of ensuring peace and security on a global scale. The journey has only just begun, and the metaverse holds an important key to unlocking a new era of defense modernization. 

Learn more

To learn more about how Microsoft for Defense and Intelligence, and its partners are unlocking the potential for defense across capability development, advancing defense missions, securing supply chains, and bolstering cyber resilience, contact your account representative today.

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There’s now a greater understanding that in the face of aggressive and integrated cyber and kinetic actions, the physical dispersal of critical infrastructure, systems, and data is a critical defense strategy. Data security and resiliency are now being enhanced by the distribution of digital operations and data assets across borders and into other countries. It’s underscored the value of, and need for, the migration of defense and intelligence workloads to the cloud—so long as that cloud is built from a foundation of trust, privacy, and security, like Microsoft Azure.

“Before the invasion of Ukraine, governments thought that data needed to stay inside a country in order to be secure. After the invasion, migrating data to the cloud and moving outside territorial borders is now a part of resiliency planning and good governance.“—Cristin Flynn Goodwin, Associate General Counsel, Customer Security and Trust, Microsoft.¹

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Digital transformation in defense hinges on partnership and interoperability

Recent geopolitical events have highlighted advances in cyber threat intelligence and end-point protection. They’ve also demonstrated that a coordinated and comprehensive strategy to strengthen defenses against the full range of cyber destructive attacks, espionage, and influence operations is required.

The latter point recognizes the principle at the heart of interoperability—that allies and industry must collaborate and develop a collective response for the most effective defense. When responding to adversaries, allied support and coordination are critical. With today’s adversaries engaging in hybrid warfare methods, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and domestic terrorism, defense agencies are increasingly reliant on data-sharing and collaborating—across organizations, agencies, and national and international borders.  

Furthermore, it’s clear that digital transformation and technology acceleration in defense hinges on partnerships with the defense industrial base and non-traditional technology vendors—including commercial tech companies and the start-up ecosystem.

Nevertheless, the risk appetite for sharing resources remains low due to legacy policies that continue to guide the adoption of on-premises solutions that are vulnerable to modern attacks.

Instead, through the adoption of hyper-scale cloud and edge, with a cybersecurity approach built on a foundation of trust and security, defense and intelligence organizations can achieve their goals as it relates to both security and interoperability. When defense and intelligence organizations migrate workloads into the Microsoft Azure Cloud, they benefit from an unprecedented, ever-deepening, and unwavering commitment to securing data from the ever-increasing number of cyber threats.

The Microsoft Cyber Defense Operations Center (CDOC) is one example of the more than USD20 billion we’ve committed to investing over the next five years in security, data protection, and risk management. The CDOC brings together cybersecurity specialists and data scientists in an every day facility to combat threats in real-time. Microsoft is connected to more than 8,500 security professionals globally across our product development teams, information security groups, and legal teams to protect our cloud infrastructure and services, products and devices, and internal resources.²

So let’s take a look at the threat environment that is shaping the Microsoft cybersecurity approach.

The Current threat environment

National defense and intelligence organizations around the world are facing three types of cyber adversaries that threaten national security:

1. Cybercriminals

Cybercriminals look to monetize compromised data either through ransomware directly from victims or by selling it to Foreign Nation States.

2. Foreign Nation State actors

Foreign Nation State actors aim to engage in intellectual property theft, espionage, surveillance, credential theft, and disruptive and destructive attacks to further their national interests.

3. Hacktivists

Hacktivists conduct cyberattacks to cause disruption in order to further social or political goals.

Given the motivation, scale, organization, and sophistication of adversaries launching cyberattacks, defense and intelligence organizations must modernize their cybersecurity systems and approach. Otherwise, they risk being outmaneuvered by more sophisticated adversaries (or even less sophisticated actors with access to technology) leveraging AI, automation, and the scale of hyper-cloud systems to carry out their attacks.

Three steps to improving cybersecurity capabilities

Below are three key actions defense and intelligence organizations can take to modernize and improve their cybersecurity capabilities:

1. Enhance early-detection systems across the defense digital ecosystem continuum

Leveraging a hyper-scale cloud enables defense and intelligence organizations to detect, respond, and deter attacks early. For example, Microsoft Cloud spans over 200 data centers across 140 countries and analyzes 43 trillion security signals daily. Combined with the intelligence gained by tracking more than 250 unique nation-states, cybercriminals, and other threat actors, we provide defense and intelligence organizations with a unique global perspective. This global threat intelligence perspective enables early detection and response to emerging threats across multi-cloud, hybrid, on-premises, and heterogeneous platforms.

2. Adopt an organization-wide Zero Trust philosophy

Beyond the technical architecture and products necessary to implement a Zero Trust Framework, every individual at every level of the organization must live by, implement, and adhere to the three core principles of Zero Trust:

1. Explicitly verify: Always authenticate and authorize users based on all available data points before allowing access to resources. This includes user identity, location, device health, service or workload, data classification, and anomalies.
2. Use least privilege access: Limit user access with just-in-time (JIT) and just-enough-access (JEA), risk-based adaptive policies, and data protection to help secure both data and productivity.
3. Assume breach: Assume system defenses have been breached and systems might be compromised. Verify end-to-end encryption and use analytics to get visibility, drive threat detection, and improve defenses.

3. Use Automation as a force multiplier to mitigate threats at scale

According to the 2022 (ISC)² Cybersecurity Workforce Study, there’s a global shortage of 3.4 million workers in cybersecurity. With this deficit, modern automated security platforms must be used by all organizations, including the defense and intelligence community, as a force multiplier to fill in the cyber talent gap.

Microsoft offers best-in-class capabilities across all security pillars of the digital estate. According to the Forrester Total Economic Impact Studies, Microsoft Security tools reduce the likelihood of a data breach by 45 percent,³ reduce the time to threat mitigation by 50 percent,⁴ and reduce the amount of labor associated with advanced investigations by 80 percent.⁵ 

A foundation that supports the mission

As mentioned, defense and intelligence organizations seek to simultaneously increase security, while also increasing interoperability. In the face of the threat environment highlighted above, Microsoft is committed to meeting the increasing need for defense and intelligence organizations to interoperate with allies and collaborate with trusted partners. Hyperscale cloud serves as the digital foundation for interoperability and collaboration while offering improved security postures over traditional legacy, on-premises approaches.

That’s not to say that the cloud is appropriate for every single scenario. Certainly, in our industry, we know that’s not the case. For instance, there are currently requirements for mission data to remain air-gapped. Nonetheless, we also recognize that the vast majority of workloads across all industries—defense and intelligence included—can and should be serviced in the public hyper-scale cloud because it is the gold standard for security, resilience, and economics.

So how can we deliver on the unique needs of our defense and intelligence customers who work across the entire classification spectrum, and for which classified mission workloads must be air-gapped? We take an end-to-end view of our customer’s needs—from the enterprise to tactical edge—and include coalition and industry requirements for interoperability and collaboration.

For classified mission workloads, hybrid and on-premises capabilities remain an important part of the overall landscape and Microsoft will deliver on that need. We also recognize the need to leverage contemporary capabilities, such as AI, digital twin, and simulation, and understand how information superiority, through the application of these capabilities, is a force multiplier.

That’s why we support your mission by first leveraging our hyper-scale capabilities, to meet as many customer requirements as we can, across the entire classification spectrum. Where this isn’t possible (like some classified and mission workloads) we leverage our Azure Stack portfolio for air-gapped and disconnected operations, whilst continuing to invest in hybrid infrastructure and provision of control plane technologies that bring all of these environments seamlessly together.

Achieving a secure digital backbone

The task to modernize and increase interoperability while navigating today’s threat environment is achievable with partnership across defense, intelligence, government, non-government organizations and industry, academia, and the science and technology (S&T) community. Cybersecurity threats are increasing and will continue to evolve as threat actors gain access to technology and evolve their techniques to conduct destructive cyber-attacks, espionage, and influence operations. Defense and intelligence organizations can have confidence knowing Microsoft Azure is designed to implement the steps discussed to improve cybersecurity and serve as the organization’s secure digital backbone to achieve the mission.

We recognize, though, that transformational progress can be often tempered by policies that seek to simply reinforce legacy approaches rather than inspire new ones. To move forward, we encourage open discussion between defense and industry and across government alliances, working together to express your interest in sharing a common digital backbone and data fabric. 

Learn more

To discuss how Microsoft can help you deliver a secure digital defense and intelligence backbone, we invite you to connect with us on LinkedIn or reach out to your account team representative.

• Alvaro Vitta | LinkedIn
• Jonathon (Jono) Beesley, DSM, GAICD | LinkedIn
• Lloyd Hewitt | LinkedIn

For more insights, you can also listen to a two-part cybersecurity miniseries on the Microsoft Public Sector Future Podcast, Episode 36: Cyber Resilience in Government and Episode 37: Military Lessons on Cyberdefense, where we discuss how public sector organizations can be better prepared for future attacks, best practices for protecting sensitive data, and why making risk-based decisions are so important.

¹Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022 | Microsoft Security

² Microsoft Cybersecurity Defense Operations Center—Security | Microsoft Docs

³ The Total Economic Impact™ Of Securing Apps With Microsoft Azure Active Directory

⁴ The Total Economic Impact™ of Defender for Cloud from Forrester Consulting

⁵ The Total Economic Impact™ of Microsoft Sentinel from Forrester Consulting.

The post Microsoft for Defense and Intelligence: Secure the digital defense ecosystem and improve interoperability appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As global defense and intelligence organizations embark on their digital transformation journeys, they are increasingly looking to technology to assist in the design, development, deployment, and sustainment of military assets, as well as increased agility and speed. This requires a shift for both defense forces and their industry partners from legacy methodologies to a digital engineering approach, with forces and industry collaborating across the entire mission capability lifecycle. At the heart of this transformation is moving from the unwieldy and resource-intensive legacy procurement and development methodologies to agile, adaptive approaches that deliver high-value, innovative capabilities directly to the individual in the military at the speed of relevance.

Increasing the velocity of the capability lifecycle through an integrated digital approach to system development will be a theme that is front of mind at the forthcoming Atlantic Future Forum. The Atlantic Future Forum exists to help strengthen the defense, security, technology, and trading relationships between democratic nations. The forum brings together senior politicians, policymakers, military leaders, and academia, together with business leaders and entrepreneurs from the United Kingdom, the United States, and other allied countries.

Microsoft at Atlantic Future Forum

The Microsoft Global Defense and Intelligence team will be at the Atlantic Future Forum 2022 to discuss how the allied defense community can leverage commercial technology and modern development paradigms to support militaries and defense industrial base partners alike, in their capability lifecycle transformation goals. Our commitment is based on seamless delivery of three tenets¹ that underpin digital engineering strategies:

• Model Based Engineering. Employing models and authoritative sources of data across the entire capability, system, or product lifecycle. These models may be digitized and supported through contemporary modeling, simulation, and virtualization that, amongst other things, support the generation of digital twins to digitally mirror and represent the capability through design into production and across the entire lifecycle.
• Agile and DevSecOps development methodologies. Agile and DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) approaches introduce regular customer and user feedback and allow for rapid and iterative deployments of highest-value capabilities, thereby enabling the fielding of these capabilities in far more rapid timescales than seen in traditional methods (such as a waterfall).
• Modular, Open Architectures. Incorporating open architectures and modular components expands the opportunities for technology insertion and enables sharing across coalition allies, while also creating opportunities for non-traditional industry partners to contribute to the defense tech stack—thereby increasing the opportunity for disruption and innovation. Furthermore, the provision of these capabilities in a secure cloud environment provides the resilience, flexibility, and portability desired by defense and intelligence organizations, allowing resources to be safely shared with trusted partners.

Embracing the adoption of a digital engineering approach is a key enabler for coalition partners to maintain their technological advantage over adversaries, building systems smarter, and faster, with more user feedback, and improved efficiency. This, in turn, is a foundational step in delivering mission superiority to the allied defense ecosystem. We are seeing a tremendous appetite across Five Eyes, NATO, NORAD, and other alliances to leverage commercial development paradigms, commoditized technologies, and collaborate more effectively on mission capability development in a common and secure environment.

Learn more at the event

We are keen to continue the discussion on both securing the cyber domain and this topic at the Atlantic Future Forum 2022 in New York City from September 28 to 29. In addition, our Defense and Intelligence team will be participating in three sessions: Conflict in the information age, AI and the Future of Human Decision Making, and Accelerated digital adoption – a critical defense enabler?

We look forward to connecting with existing partners—and making new ones—at this important event.

¹There is No Spoon: The New Digital Acquisition Reality. October 2020.

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Technology advances that have improved the interoperability of forces in a conflict will be the focus of several upcoming discussions. We hope you will join us for the webinar, Enabling Interoperability in the Future Operating Environment. Set for April 28, 2022, at 4:00 PM Pacic Time, the event will show organizations that are interoperable can respond with agility, leveraging technology to collect, analyze, and disseminate massive amounts of data.  

Following that, our Defense and Intelligence team will be at June’s Eurosatory 2022 event to discuss ways in which we are working with militaries and other security forces to improve operations and protect national security. Since 1967, Eurosatory has brought together exhibitors and visitors from around the world and is a major forum for discussions about the evolution of defense and security issues. We encourage you to register now for this important and strikingly relevant event. Our commitment to this is based on five principles:

1. Delivering a trusted and secure digital backbone built on secure cloud-enabled capabilities.
2. Empower personnel and modernize facilities to better meet the needs of warfighters and their families.
3. Transform the capability lifecycle to support the defense industrial base.
4. Optimize decision advantages with data and AI that support readiness and mission effectiveness.
5. Enhance interoperability to ensure secure data-sharing with partners and allies.

Enhance interoperability with collaboration

The key context is that today’s defense challenges exist at a scale, scope, and complexity that no military can meet alone. In addition, the pace of change is such that defense organizations—particularly those of the middle powers—are having to decide how they balance their investment in mass against the need to modernize.

This is driving closer ties and new relationships, such as the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) partnership of 2021, designed to strengthen credible deterrence in the Indo-Pacific and to assist in that mass versus modernization issue, through sharing of innovation and technology.

And it’s important to note that this alliance adds to, rather than sidelines, other agreements with a regional focus, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving India, the United States, Japan, and Australia. These new alliances drive a need for improved interoperability so that alliance members can respond quickly and effectively to regional instabilities, traditional warfare, cyber warfare, or warfare in space. Meanwhile older associations, such as the Five Eyes intelligence partnership involving the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia are being reinvigorated with additional requirements for interoperability at scale.

For instance, Australia’s 2020 Defence Strategic Update and Force Structure Plan dramatically shifts the focus of the Australian defense forces from largely defensive operations to one that is capable of deterrent, offensive operations. The revised plan acknowledges that regional coalitions will play an important role in any future conflicts, meaning that Australian forces will need to be ready to quickly share data and planning to better coordinate responses.

Similarly, the United States military is taking a fresh look at its strategic thinking, with a new commitment to empowering allies, integrating supply chains, and planning across military commands.

Our own contribution to this shift will be to leverage our heavy investment across multiple nations, as well as our team’s deep experience within defense and intelligence organizations. This gives us great insight into the benefits of interoperability, as well as how data can improve mission planning, logistical structures, and military training.

Technology for space

We’re also taking a hard look at the role space will play. Microsoft Azure Space was created to be the space-based platform of choice for the growing needs of the space community. We’re using it to give new power to cloud computing, create a thriving ecosystem of satellite providers, and discover new technologies to help the space community create new capabilities.

The creation of powerful space-based 5G networks will allow us to distribute data securely across a battlefield and link force headquarters to the combat edge via satellite. Tools such as the Microsoft Azure Stack Edge can analyze that data, then use today’s interoperability standards to knit together the space-based assets of allies.

Our upcoming webinar, Enabling Interoperability in the Future Operating Environment, and Eurosatory 2022 could not be more relevant or important. We’re looking forward to connecting with existing partners—and making new ones—during these valuable activities.

The post Discover how interoperability enables cooperation at Eurosatory 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

A changing geopolitical situation, new ways of warfare, increasing cyber threats, and the rise of space capabilities and 5G communication are transforming Defense organizations. That transformation has been given even more impetus by COVID-19, which forced many organizations to reconsider their operating paradigms.

Adapting to this complex and fluid landscape is impacting militaries’ ability to maintain forces at an appropriate state of readiness. But what do I mean by “readiness”? To me, it’s the confluence of three core factors, personnel, equipment and training, and their combined ability to influence Defense’s key operating priorities of:

1. Maintaining the existing force through raising, training, and sustaining the existing capability.
2. Employing a force on designated missions and tasks, with superior mission planning, situational awareness, and interoperability.
3. Generating a future force designed to meet emerging and future challenges.

All three of these priorities, and the readiness status of the military capabilities that are employed therein, are powered by a digital foundation.

[See our infographic on the “new normal” of military readiness]

Let me explain:

Maintaining the existing force

Technology provides a decisive advantage for maintaining readiness through this phase. This includes establishing the groundwork for digitization of the battlespace and underpinning a “train as you fight” approach that ensures every member of a force is familiar with the digital tools that make a force agile, interoperable, and decisive.

Maintaining the force also demands perpetual training. Defense forces are finding that rapidly expanding capabilities in modeling and simulation, along with mixed reality, gaming techniques and processes, is driving a transformational shift in mission rehearsal and training. By eliminating costly and complex physical training, digital training also features scalability, realism, increased safety, and a highly personalized training experience.

A third component of digital readiness flows from ubiquitous ERP data. ERP—enterprise resource planning—has changed the face of military readiness, through the exploitation of commercial and private-sector best practices. The next step is to couple the foundational ERP capability with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, enabling the fusion of data from a vast array of sources, and giving Defense organizations game-changing capabilities around materiel availability and asset readiness.

Employing a superior force

Without execution, nothing else really matters. Digital technology supports force preparedness in a multitude of ways. For one, it creates the common operating picture and situational awareness that drives mission effectiveness. Defense staffs at all levels need a trusted source of information, delivered in time to allow them to act decisively. This information often exists in disparate systems, making it difficult or even impossible to get instantaneous access to the right information. Modern cloud-based solutions and AI bring all the key pieces of data together, speeding the OODA¹ loop and empowering decision superiority.

The successful employment of the force also requires matching the appropriate assets and optimum course of action to the emerging threat. By adopting synthetic environments and a range of AI and machine/deep-learning techniques, intelligent agents can be developed that mimic human performance in war-gaming and provide tipping and cueing during mission execution. Mixed reality allows the planners to be immersed in the virtual world as they plan and explore possible outcomes, collaborating remotely with others, and enabling the final scenario to be output directly into mission rehearsal.

Increasingly, mission success relies on data capture, analytics, and AI at the edge. Once a force is deployed it both creates and consumes vast quantities of data. Utilizing contemporary digital technologies, infrastructure, and services, including exploitation of 5G and space-based communications, this data can be securely delivered to military leaders for better, faster decision-making.

Generating the future force

What will the operational environment look like in five years, 10 years, or even 20 years? This type of planning typically relies on determining likely futures against a significant range of assumptions and can be improved in several ways.

One is through advanced simulation and modeling. Determining a future state considers current and emerging threats and juxtaposes them with policy and strategy. This requires sophisticated processes and technology that can exploit vast arrays of data, and apply AI, and simulations that are able to make sense of many and varied futures, enabling a better understanding of a future force’s needs.

This forward-looking approach is improved with technology such as digital twins for simulation. Digital twins—virtual replicas of physical assets—create high-fidelity digital representations of the real world, allowing users to predict failures, assess performance against new threats, and generate efficiency across the entire lifecycle of a system.

Lastly, generating the future force relies on an agile and secure platform for capability development. The right digital platform can help Defense conceptualize, design, and implement new mission capabilities, providing Defense-specific tools and processes that ensure that all capability inputs are considered at every stage of development, and leaving data firmly under defense ownership for exploitation throughout the asset lifecycle.

Join us for a transformational journey

Microsoft is a trusted mission partner, bringing more than 40 years of collaboration with Defense and Intelligence organizations around the globe. That makes us ideal to help militaries on their readiness transformation journey. We do this by focusing on trust, innovation, security, identity, and compliance, all powered by our extensive global partner ecosystem.

Learn more about how we are helping organizations face the new challenges of military readiness.

¹Observe, Orient, Decide, Act

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