Cyber Mission Force training with VMware AI – News

The Cyber Mission Force plays a critical role in defending national security, maintaining U.S. military readiness and securing dominance in the digital battlespace.

To support that mission, Cole Engineering Services Inc. is using VMware vDefend to deliver threat visibility and lateral defense, helping build secure, scalable cyber training environments for the Cyber Mission Force, according to Gillon Helman (pictured, right), vice president of engineering, cyber programs, at Cole Engineering.

“Over the past year or so, we’ve gone through a massive expansion of our platform,” Helman said. “The idea is that there’s multiple cyber protection teams out there, and the more people we can get through training, the better prepared they’re going to be for that sophisticated attack from some nation state out there. We’ve implemented new multi-tenant security measures using Avi and vDefend and things like that to make those internal systems more resilient. We are able to execute malware in our systems, offensive cyber attacks in our platform and maintain that security of our platform as we move through it.”

Helman and Umesh Mahajan (left), vice president and general manager of the Application Networking and Security Division at Broadcom Inc., spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Rebecca Knight at VMware Explore, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Broadcom and Cole Engineering are advancing the Cyber Mission Force with next-generation training and security innovations. (* Disclosure below.)

Cole Engineering strengthens Cyber Mission Force with VMware

Cole Engineering boosts the Cyber Mission Force with advanced training and security to counter sophisticated attacks and safeguard critical infrastructure. That capability is made possible through the Persistent Cyber Training Environment built on VMware Cloud Foundation, which allows sensitive scenarios to be spun up quickly and safely, according to Helman.

“Cole Engineering has been around since 2004 … back in 2018, we started in the cybersecurity realm,” he said. “We are on a contract called Cyber TRIDENT, which is under U.S. Cyber Command. We run the … Persistent Cyber Training Environment. Primarily, what we do is provide individual and collective training to all the cyber mission forces under U.S. Cyber Command. That’s the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard and our foreign partners as well. It’s a full life cycle training system.”

Broadcom is blending cutting-edge AI across its security and infrastructure offerings. That means faster, smarter threat response, less reliance on human intervention and safer deployment of autonomous AI applications, all while scaling for complex, modern IT environments, according to Mahajan. 

“We are doing a lot of work in the product itself, ask a few simple questions, use some AI [and machine learning] techniques and then come up with the firewall rules in a step-wise manner,” he said. “The second area of focus is AI and gen AI. We come up with intelligent assist or co-pilot for our products so that the customers can be more productive as they use our product. The other one is secure AI and agentic AI workloads, so we have a plan and a strategy on how to do that … those are our big focus areas.” 

Here’s the complete video interview, part of News’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMware Explore: 

(* Disclosure: Broadcom Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Broadcom nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

Photo: News