Maryland’s emerging cyber hub scored a significant gain with the opening of Boeing Corp.’s 32,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Cyber Engagement Center (CEC) in Annapolis Junction on Oct. 25.
The new facility consolidates the assets used to monitor and defend Boeing’s global network, but the move goes well beyond a simple exercise in internal efficiency and streamlining. As company officials noted at the ribbon cutting ceremony, it also gives the defense contractor considerable flexibility to weather fallout from a still shaky economy.
“The risks to industry and government cybersecurity grow every second of every day,” said John Hinshaw, vice president and general manager, Boeing Information Solutions. “We’ve established this center to work collaboratively with our customers to help defend their critical infrastructure — as well as our own.”
That collaboration includes the ability to leverage Boeing’s recent business-focused acquisitions, a strategy aimed at mitigating a projected decline in federal budget dollars by expanding the company’s global customer base.
Of course, it also doesn’t hurt to have a location that’s practically on the doorstep of NSA and just a short drive from many of the other federal agencies Boeing serves.
Boeing officials declined to comment on the overall cost of the new facility.
Collaborative Venue
According to a company statement, the CEC offers secure meeting areas as well as dynamic data analysis, information sharing, traffic intelligence, analytics and other capabilities for commercial and defense customers. It is staffed by cybersecurity experts and research and development teams from across the Boeing enterprise, offering coverage for more than 250,000 users across the company supply base and more than 1 million different nodes from the network.
“This center will be a venue where we can bring in a broader range of customers, including other companies … to demonstrate new technologies,” said Boeing Executive Vice President Dennis Muilenburg.
“We always knew that if we could get our national security customers into our network they would have better insight into our capabilities,” said Roger Krone, president of Network & Space Systems for Boeing. “Our operations center is in Bellevue, Wash., but to get someone from Fort Meade to Bellevue [is difficult].”
Krone estimated that the CEC will support upwards of 25 full-time employees in addition to roughly 12 to 18 full-time employees in the Information Systems Organization. “The center is really set up to do collaborative engagements with mission partners, so we could probably surge to over 100 people here as we do exercises and simulations,” he said.
Capabilities
The capabilities Boeing chose to highlight during an October media tour centered on four key technologies marketed through its Information Solutions Organization. The first, Secure Mobile Enterprise, provides the means to allow personal and other outside mobile devices to operate in a secure workspace without security risks. A second, the Cyber Threat Management Center, allows cyber technicians to see and address threats coming into the Boeing network and its customers’ networks from across the globe.
Boeing also demonstrated its Video Surveillance Operations Center (VSOC), which provides enhanced physical building and facility security. “We now have one console to monitor both the physical security and the cybersecurity platforms,” Hinshaw said.
Finally, Boeing highlighted its Tripwire Analytic Capability product, which uses real-time situational awareness of cyber threats to defend the networks Boeing monitors.
Posturing
Boeing’s expansion in Maryland comes at a time when the overall U.S. defense budget is entering a period of decline.
“We anticipate seeing as much as $450 billion in defense budget reduction over the next 10 years, but that could be as high as one trillion dollars,” Muilenburg said.
To offset that decline, Boeing has focused investment in its core product line across satellites and aircraft, and is now working to expand its presence internationally.
As a result, the company has increased its international revenue share from about 7% nine years ago to a current figure of roughly 18%, with growth expected to hit 25% to 30% in the near future.
“That has somewhat mitigated the U.S. defense budget decline,” Muilenburg said. “The other big factor and part of our strategy is to continue moving aggressively in markets that we expect to continue to grow even in the face of an overall U.S. defense budget decline.”
One obvious sector is cybersecurity.
“We see this market sector largely growing at high single digits or double digits,” Muilenburg said, “and we would expect our growth in this market to be similar to what we see in the overall market.”
As part of its diversification strategy, Boeing has made substantial investments in cybersecurity research and development and acquisitions during the past several years.
Two recent acquisitions, eXMeritus and Kestrel, are instrumental in providing industry-leading data analysis and secure information-sharing capabilities.
At the same time, the acquisitions of Narus and SMSi have added the real-time traffic intelligence solutions and analytics capabilities. They will help protect and maintain the integrity of distributed IP networks for government carriers and critical infrastructure employees.
Mini-BRAC
For Boeing, launching the CEC was an effort akin to the recently completed federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) move process, albeit on a much smaller scale. “People transferred pretty much from around the Potomac region,” Krone said, an effort that required Boeing to set up a temporary operations center in Crystal City, Va., to avoid what he termed a “hot start” at the CEC.
“As we grow our footprint here, we hope to see an increase in jobs,” Krone said, emphasizing Boeing’s commitment to support cyber education programs at high schools and universities within Maryland. “We are heavily engaged with UMBC and other University of Maryland institutions, hiring graduates on their campuses [because] we find tremendous value there.”
Muilenburg stressed the importance of engaging students down to the early education level. “It’s fundamentally important in our country to keep investing in future talent,” he said.
As for the future of cybersecurity, Krone sees a clear analogy with the aviation industry.
“This is sort of the unregulated, unstructured management era,” he said. “It really took recognition by the government to decide how we were going to add structure to air traffic management so we could use the skies for recreation and commerce. It required government regulation so that [vastly different aircraft types] could fly in the same airspace safely.”
Treaty relationships with other countries also laid the foundation for international air commerce, he said.
“We see [regulation] as the next stage in maturing the cyberspace, and we see that as a really positive development,” Krone said. “This is a hundred-year market for us … and that adds to our excitement of why we are making the investment in a facility like this. This is a huge inflection point and a commitment by the Boeing Corp. to be a major player in teaming with our customers on their mission in cyberspace.”
