Northrop Grumman [NOC] on Nov. 19 launched a new center of excellence aimed at bringing together the corporation’s cyber capabilities to better able to meet its customers’ needs.
The company said the Advanced Cyber Technology Center (ACTC) will link its relevant personnel and partners throughout the enterprise to quickly develop high-end solutions to the “toughest cyber challenges.”
“We’re investing strategically to provide affordable solutions to the most complex customer needs,” Vern Boyle, director of Technology for the Cyber Division within Northrop Grumman’s Information Systems segment, said in a statement. He said at a press conference the company hosted to announce the ACTC, which Boyle will lead, that Northrop Grumman’s customers have the biggest challenges when it comes to cyber security, big data and information processing.
“It’s important to understand the customers we serve cannot use commercial tech alone to address their problems,” Boyle said. “It simply will not work to deal with the kind of problem they have.”
The ACTC has what Northrop Grumman calls four “centers of gravity” or collaboration centers that will consist of physical labs in Northern Virginia, in Annapolis Junction, Md., which is near the National Security Agency, Cheltenham, England, and Canberra, Australia.
The distributed center has global reach because the company’s customers are “also global,” Boyle said. The labs will be “regional focal points” for developing advanced solutions and demonstrating them to customers, he said.
Boyle described some of the solutions that the ACTC is working on. These include being able to protect and defend critical systems and networks, including enabling critical mission capabilities to continue function while under attack “inside the system,” he said. Disposable cyber systems, which would be used one time, are one kind of solution being worked on to allow “customers to move faster than the adversary,” increasing the difficulty for adversaries to persist inside a system and even understand what they are seeing, he said.
Other capabilities the center will work on include automation to help operators and analysts be more effective, trusted mobility solutions to allow users to access classified data remotely, high end analytic algorithms, full spectrum cyber capabilities such as “fight back” and fast and accurate data processing that works better “than typical commercial systems,” Boyle said.
The ACTC adds to existing centers of excellence Northrop Grumman stood up last year to consolidate work and better align its Aerospace Systems segment with customer needs. Those centers are focused on manned aircraft design, unmanned systems, electronic attack, and aircraft integration.