Digital Battlespace
Raytheon enhancing cyber offerings
Raytheon is set to pilot its Appsmart marketplace to five potential customers over the next six months as the system nears its final development.
The company has been developing Appsmart for some two years, and the customer demonstrations are due to be complete by the beginning of next year at which point it is expected to be production ready.
Larri Rosser, Appsmart chief engineer at the company, told Shephard that after the piloting ‘we hope that both we and the government will have a better understanding of Appsmart’.
‘Our intention is to save the government a great deal of money. We handle the payment of the developers and our goal it to get a vibrant global network,’ Rosser said.
The Appsmart idea is based on commercial marketplaces for mobile applications, such as i-Tunes and the Android market, but can be used on larger devices.
‘It would look a lot like an app market…but we serve more than mobile devices. The government is very interested in the innovation and efficiency of the commercial market.’
However, Rosser explained that an entirely commercial system would not be secure enough, so Raytheon is effectively ‘ruggedising’ the marketplace to make it secure enough with control and management that adheres to military standards.
‘It’s trying to bring those two worlds together,’ she said.
Applications can be added to the marketplace by Raytheon, which avoids the military having to release RfPs, in turn speeding up the process of the apps being available for use.
Meanwhile Ward Heinke, director of cyber defence solutions at Raytheon, explained that in light of a reliance on network-centric capabilities, the company is concentrating its efforts on cyber defence.
‘I think we are very net-centric and we will continue to be so,’ Heinke explained. ‘I don’t see a retraction from that. We live in a very interconnected world; we have to deal with that.
‘This starts with the understanding that we, as a major aerospace and defence provider, rely on information that is very technical.’
Heinke said that Raytheon acknowledges that this information is desirable to third parties: ‘We also recognise that many of the products we provide rely on cyberspace. We’re addressing some of the most sophisticated threats out there today.
‘In recognition of the threat Raytheon began a journey 7-8 years ago to amass capabilities to lead us to be ahead in cyber defence. We have an understanding of where threats may exist.’
He identified that a key element of dealing with the cyber threat is ‘knowing what’s on the network’ as well as ‘knowing the mind of the attacker’.
Raytheon also highlighted its Trusted Thin Client offering, which presents different classifications of data on one interface for a user, and the SureView system for cyber threat monitoring.
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