ANNAPOLIS JUNCTION, Md.—Boeing [BA] recently celebrated the opening of a new cyber security center in Maryland near the home of the National Security Agency (NSA) in a move that for the first time brings the full spectrum of the company’s cyber capabilities in one location while enhancing its ability to work with its various customers, including the intelligence community.
At the new Cyber Engagement Center near Fort Meade, Boeing analysts can monitor the company’s global computer network for potential security threats while also allowing it to demonstrate new technology and solutions for its customers in a live environment, company officials said.
“This center is a combination of a center that provides protection of Boeing’s operational network while we have the capability to demonstrate new technologies for customers,” said Dennis Muilenburg, president and CEO of Boeing’s Defense, Space and Security division. The company has more than 250,000 users on its network and more than one million nodes so “protecting our global network every day is a tough demanding job,” he said.
Boeing has a network operations center in Bellevue, Wash., but locating it at the CEC enables the company to give its national security customers “better insight” into what it does with its own network and how the company can help them with their mission, said Roger Krone, president of Boeing Network & Space Systems.
“”We had this vision that said, ‘I wonder if we can bring all the best of the Boeing into a facility where you could walk outside the gate of NSA and come visit,’ and that’s really what we’ve been able to do here,” Krone said.
In the past two years, Boeing has made a number of acquisitions to allow it to offer more comprehensive information security capabilities through the purchase of Argon ST, eXMeritus, Kestrel and Narus. Organic growth is Boeing’s preferred path forward but it will continue to consider niche acquisitions in cyber security, Muilenburg said.
Cyber security is one area of federal spending that Boeing believes will continue to grow amid a constrained budget environment. The company estimates that overall spending on cyber security, be it government or commercial, will continue to grow in the high single-digit to low double-digit range, with Boeing able to capture similar shares, the officials said.
Currently Boeing’s cyber security-related revenue, which the company doesn’t disclose, is about 80 percent from government contracts and 20 percent in the commercial market, the officials said.
Customers are still in the “early days” of grappling with their cyber security challenges, said John Hinshaw, vice president and general manager of Boeing Information Solutions. Krone, who characterizes the cyber arena as the “Wild West” in terms of the government just beginning to set forth regulations to enable “everyone to play safely,” said the cyber market a “100-year market for us.” This is one reason why Boeing was ready to invest in the CEC, he said.
The 32,000 square foot CEC facility will house between three and four dozen full-time employees with the ability to surge to over 100 for various exercises and demonstrations.
At the grand opening, Boeing demonstrated four of its technology solutions. One was the Secure Mobile Enterprise, in which the company is creating for itself and its customers the ability to use commercial-off-the-shelf mobile devices such as iPhones, iPads and Droids, in personal and secure work environments by offering end-to-end security capabilities.
The company also showed its security management platform, the Visual Security Operations Console, that was originally developed to integrated physical security sensors such as cameras and radars but can now display and alarm on threats to computer networks. In the demonstration, Boeing said that cyber threats could be isolated to a particular blade server.
Boeing also demonstrated its Cyber Threat Management Center that it uses to protect its global computer network and its TAC real-time situational awareness of cyber threats software platform.