Satnews Daily
February 13th, 2013

DISA... The Time Has Come To Double Up... (Comms)


[SatNews] The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has announced that the enterprise collaboration tool for the...

...Department of Defense (DoD) is about to double in capacity. Defense Connect Online (DCO) is the DoD’s enterprise tool to facilitate collaboration by allowing users to communicate and share information through the use of audio-video qeb conferencing, instant messaging, and low-bandwidth text chat. DCO is a service provided to all DoD partners and is available through both the Sensitive but Unclassified Internet Protocol (IP) Data Service (formerly known as NIPRNet) and the Secret IP Data Service (formerly known as SIPRNet).

DCO has recently experienced unprecedented growth and now boasts more than 800,000 registered users. This growth was accelerated by the DoD-wide effort to cut travel and conference expenses, and now more DoD users are using DCO to conduct online meetings and training. Due to the rapid increase in demand, DCO’s unclassified capacity requirements significantly increased beyond projections, which resulted in some instances of poor system performance and denial of service during peak usage times.

DISA, which provides this enterprise service, makes every effort to plan ahead to meet capacity requirements and has expedited previously scheduled expansion plans to immediately address the situation. In the short-term, capacity will double by February 15 to permit twice as many simultaneous users. In the long-term, DISA is enacting measures that will expedite future expansion of the service by incrementally adding capacity as demand dictates.