Bishop assists in accreditation of data storage process to be used by AEDC and AFMC

  • Published
  • By Deidre Ortiz
  • AEDC/PA
The Department of Defense at Arnold Air Force Base recently had a critical mission requirement to support the processing and storage of sensitive North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) data at the AEDC Advanced Missile Signature Center.

Summer Bishop, information assurance specialist at Arnold, stepped up to the plate to help with this effort.

“The needed systems were not authorized at the required NATO security level, so we were asked by our client to modify one of our existing systems to become compliant with the NATO cybersecurity requirements and seek re-accreditation,” she said. “These requirements are very comprehensive and can be very different from DOD requirements.”

Bishop added that this process is new to AEDC.

“Since AEDC didn’t have a system accredited to support this type of data, and our cognizant security organization at Air Force Materiel Command had never accredited this type of system, we had very little guidance,” she said.

Part of the process included researching NATO requirements and mapping them to the cybersecurity controls on the current system.
“I created a requirements matrix, which mapped our controls to the NATO requirements, linked source documents and identified required actionable items,” Bishop said.

According to Randy Sloan, cybersecurity manager for the Test Operation and Sustainment contractor, “the Authorizing Official’s staff at AFMC stated that Summer’s work was outstanding and will now be used as the new standard for Development, Test and Evaluation (DT&E) systems requiring NATO accreditation across AFMC.”

CeCe Doub, physicist at Arnold AFB, mentioned that as an acting data manager, storage for this type of information is much needed.

“It’s important that as the security level of information changes we still have the ability to store that information,” she said. “We’re storing this data for our Modeling & Simulation community and it’s also nice to be able to collect data that we might not otherwise have.”

Maj. Virginia Trimble, the AMSC Capability Manager, agreed with Doub and added that Bishop is supporting the collection of important data that is vital to the creation of needed missile plume models.
“We’re also able to make sure the data collected by all test participants is distilled into a usable form,” Trimble said. “Without this NATO accreditation, we would have been unable to ingest and use most of the data collected at this test.”

Leadership with the Test Operations and Sustainment contractor at Arnold Air Force Base has recognized Bishop for her leadership role in this process.

Bishop, who has been at Arnold for almost 10 years now, is also involved in coordinating the cybersecurity accreditation efforts for all of AEDC DT&E systems.