Cloudbreak: Answering the Challenges of Cyber Command and Control

As the number and size of networks maintained by the Department of Defense (DoD) continue to grow, concerns about the complexity of providing cyber security for these networks have mounted. In 2012, then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta established the Joint Cyber Centers (JCC) at U.S. geographic combatant commands (COCOMs) to coordinate cyber activities within each command’s area of responsibility (AoR) and to apprise combatant commanders of the impacts of the cyber landscape to their missions [1]. The JCCs were instituted to resolve the lack of coordinated cyber security within and across all the COCOMs. The JCCs charted their own paths for defining the structure of their organizations, determining their work processes, and procuring the tools and capabilities necessary to accomplish their missions. To help address the COCOMs’ capability needs and improve upon their model for technology delivery, leadership at the JCCs turned to Lincoln Laboratory’s Cloudbreak1 initiative, which had been sponsored by the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. During its four-year tenure, the Cloudbreak program successfully filled critical gaps in COCOMs’ cyber situational awareness by utilizing an iterative user-centered design process to rapidly deploy cyber capabilities to the warfighter. The Cloudbreak process is designed to address nearterm capability gaps once for all COCOMs rather than once for each COCOM. The overall goal of Cloudbreak