JIE and what it means to you

Air Force Space Command Public Affairs

3/24/2015 - PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. -- Airmen will soon be seeing changes to their network services as the Air Force, in partnership with the Army and Defense Information Services Agency (DISA), transitions to a Joint Information Environment.

The Joint Information Environment (JIE) is a shared, modern IT infrastructure providing enterprise services with a single security architecture. The goal of the JIE is to enable the Depart of Defense to achieve full-spectrum superiority and improve mission effectiveness by allowing warfighters to focus on the core cyber mission instead of manpower-intensive network maintenance.

The four foundational pillars of the JIE are connecting our Airmen, protecting our information, providing secure and efficient compute and store for mission applications, and delivering secure, modern enterprise services.

General John E. Hyten, commander of Air Force Space Command, highlighted the four JIE pillars in a recent speech at the AFCEA Cyberspace Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo.  He reiterated, "We have to connect our forces; we have to connect our coalition partners; we have to connect and secure weapons.  We have to connect all those pieces and then we have to protect that information.  Those simple, yet key aspects of creating a fluid, connected, and secure force is what this is all about."

While the Air Force's Base Information Transport Infrastructure (BITI) initiative focuses on delivering wired and wireless network services at each Air Force, Air Force Reserve, and Air National Guard base, another initiative, in collaboration with the Army, focuses on increasing the connectivity to the DISA Information Network (DODIN) by 40 to 100 times the current bandwidth.  Together, these initiatives will enable fast, reliable, and secure connectivity that will dramatically improve every Airman's ability to access information.

To protect our critical information resources, DISA, the Army and the Air Force have begun working toward a Single Security Architecture (SSA).  The first step in achieving the cyber security needs of the department is the Joint Regional Security Stack (JRSS).  The JRSS is a comprehensive suite of hardware and software specifically tailored to meet the unique cyber defense needs of the services and the department as a whole, including the ability to share information with our mission partners and access cloud services securely.  The Navy agreed to migrate to JRSS beginning in 2017 which will complete the joint commitment to this effort.

"So if you think about the 'protect' piece, the JRSS is the key piece of the puzzle," said General Hyten.

JIE reimagines the compute and store environment to deliver resilient applications more efficiently at a lower cost.  The compute and store pillar includes Core Data Centers (CDC), milCloud, commercial cloud, and local base data centers known as Installation Processing Nodes (IPN).  CDCs, milCloud, and commercial cloud will support functional, mission, and enterprise applications.  IPNs provide local hosting capability for services and applications that cannot be provided by any of the other methods for technical or economic reasons or are mission essential even when a base is disconnected from the DODIN.

The fourth JIE pillar, enterprise services, builds upon the foundation of the other three pillars.  The JIE's next generation of enterprise services will result in more efficient use of information assets by providing resilient and cost effective commercial capabilities to the warfighter.  These eServices will enable warfighters to focus on the core cyber mission instead of managing manpower-intensive IT commodities like e-mail and Sharepoint.  It will also increase resilience and agility through the use of scalable commercial services and deliver modern applications which integrate the Airman's desktops, tablets, or smartphones.

The JIE architecture provides the foundational elements to connect our Airmen to their data, provides a modern security model, improves application delivery platforms, and leverages industry expertise to deliver enterprise services supporting a diverse and mobile workforce.  The four JIE pillars will provide a single, secure, information environment that interconnects warfighters securely, reliably, and seamlessly at a reduced cost.