At the initiative of the Bundeswehr command, the IT infrastructure of the German Armed Forces is subject to modernization. The main focus will be on the global network of the Bundeswehr (Wide Area Network, wanbw), which is planned to be updated, expanded and brought into line with new security standards.
Real estate and data centers of the armed forces, distributed throughout Germany, are connected by 12 thousand km of fiber-optic cable. The work of computer centers, servers, as well as software and hardware on more than 180 thousand workstations in the military and home offices depends on its quality and integrity. By decision of the Federal Office for Armaments, Information Technology and the Use of the Bundeswehr (BAAINBw), the responsibilities of the global network of the Bundeswehr are assigned to the federal company BWI GmbH. The prerequisite for this was the approval in November 2020 of a draft law worth 25 million euros in the relevant committees of the Bundestag. The total cost of the upcoming works exceeds 100 million euros. Currently, under an indefinite contract, BWI GmbH acts as an IT systems center and federal IT service provider for the German Armed Forces.
Office of BWI GmbH-the main operator of wanbw
Created in 2007, the Bundeswehr's global network, together with data centers distributed throughout Germany, form the infrastructure basis of the army's IT system. In the next three years, BWI will have to upgrade all network elements, from the physical fiber-optic cable to the data layer, including access control lines to facilities. The new backbone architecture should be ready by mid-2021. Then, the deployment and migration of inpatient facilities (real estate) will begin. The goal is to complete the seamless transformation of the WAN infrastructure by the end of 2023, and to completely dismantle the old network by mid-2024.
According to open sources, the Bundeswehr has special requirements for data security and system availability. As part of the Secure Transport Framework (STF) project, BWI implements a solution that meets these security and scalability requirements. At the same time, the WAN head office works closely with the German Federal Office for Information Security (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, BSI). During the implementation of the STF project, the Bundeswehr global network will be certified for the first time for the transmission of secret (VS-nfd) data. The data is planned to be protected from unauthorized access using multi-layer cryptography based on the so-called "onion shell model". It is assumed that multi-level encryption will ensure that the network cannot be hacked by intruders.
BWI Service Group was formed in 2006 as a joint venture between IBM and Siemens. In 2017, the group became part of BWI GmbH. Since then, the company is a 100% federal organization and has an indefinite contract for the maintenance of the Hercules project (formation and operation of wanbw). In the first decade of its existence, the total cost of the project has grown to almost 13 billion rubles. euro.
Based on the materials of the resource esut.de