b'WWhat do you think are the greatest network security threats that the DOD, and your agency in particular, is facing today? How is the DOD responding to these threats? Puckett: One of the biggest challenges is that our workforce and our workloads are becoming more distributed globally. This movement from known, physically owned endpoints to an unknown and software-defined world is spreading our resources from how weve always addressed, seen, and secured our network into being able to operate and defend in real time. The simple vignette of COVID: Overnight, we had to maintain mission; move everyone to their homes, which no ones done a physical inspection of; move everyone to, for the most part their personally owned devices, which theres no device management of; and yet still be able to operate and defend and support the mission of the United States Army. The convergence ofThe biggest threat is just this changing landscape. A lot of the systems that are currently operating our mission today those elementsofwere designed with the kind of security in which we trust everything. We see this need to move to this distributed this legacy world, thisworld, this zero-trust world, but all of the operational capabilities that we have today were never designed or new world that we haveconfigured for it. Now Ive got these two worlds that were probably never meant to work in the same space trying to to operate in, and thework together. Add in rogue actors who want to sow distrust threats from all angles and chaos, by inserting themselves in the middle, because theres potentially a dollar to be made. The convergence of is becoming a perfectthose elementsof this legacy world, this new world that we have to operate in, and the threats from all anglesis storm thats driving abecoming a perfect storm thats driving a sense of urgency sense of urgency toto adapt and address it in real time.Little: We realize theres a lot of threats, both from foreign adapt and address it innations and malicious standalone actors. If we dont secure real time.them up front, there will be gaps that will allow leaks and penetrations. The response is to move to the front end of this, but securing the internet and DOD specifically is - Paul Puckett a big challenge. If we do our job right in DOD over these experiments and over this period, it can improve security.The OUSD (R&E) [Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering] 5G enterprise is working hard to get DOD ready. Weve got a lot of initiatives to get there, and Congress was smart about doing that. Rather than allocating a lot of funding in [research, development, testing and evaluation], they opted for prototyping, which means they were Securing the Nations Network|Page 3'