This year’s Alamo ACE made clear that resilience is the foundation of mission-ready networks. At the Titania stand, we witnessed firsthand this shift in how the defense community is redefining resilience and readiness.
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From preparing for CORA to modernizing legacy systems, here are our five key takeaways from the event:
1. Foundational network security builds resilience
The theme of this year’s conference “Resilience: The Key to Global Competitiveness,” set the tone for conversation about what network resilience truly means in today’s threat environment.Crucially, speakers stressed that resilience is not about recovering services after an outage, it’s about defending the network, so disruptions never become mission-impacting in the first place.
This was the message from Aaron Bishop, Chief Information Security Officer for the Department of the Air Force. He emphasized that resilience must be engineered into the network from the beginning. Every component - hardware or software - should embed protection, continuous monitoring and the ability to anticipate and withstand failure.
Keith Hardiman, Air Force Director of Enterprise Information Technology, reinforced this perspective. He highlighted the increasing complexity of the threat landscape and the urgency for the Air Force to adapt if it is to remain mission-ready.
Central to this is continuous monitoring and a risk-informed approach. Real-time network visibility is essential to spot vulnerabilities early and focus efforts on the most critical exposures.
Bishop noted that the Air Force needs to expand its use of automation to support this effort.
2. From compliance to readiness
A key topic of conversation at the Titania stand was Cyber Operational Readiness Assessment (CORA) and the pivotal shift it represents for the Air Force (and DoD).Under the previous Command Cyber Readiness Inspection (CCRI), installations were evaluated through a broad, pass/fail compliance lens. A snapshot-in-time view that does not always reflect operational risk.
Instead of treating every asset equally and enforcing blanket compliance, CORA recognizes that not all parts of the network carry the same mission impact.
CORA better aligns cybersecurity with operational reality and helps avoid the “false sense of security” that static, tick-box driven inspections can create. Feedback at the stand was consistently positive with CORA widely seen as a necessary evolution that better reflects today’s dynamic threat environment.
There was also strong recognition of how automation tools accelerate readiness. Rather than waiting for assessors to uncover issues, teams want clear insight into their CORA posture so they assure compliance and - most importantly - find and fix critical vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in their infrastructure that could be targeted by bad actors.
3. The OT attack surface
There was a recurring warning at the conference that it isn’t only traditional IT networks at risk. Operational technology (OT) supporting base infrastructure and mission-critical systems is now a prime attack vector.
However, security controls designed for traditional IT systems don’t translate directly to OT devices.
Following the 2027 Zero Trust mandate for IT, a framework specifically for OT is in production. It recognizes the reality that critical infrastructure - from power grids to water treatment plants – is in the crosshairs of state-sponsored attacks and high-value targets.
That makes continuous network visibility, configuration management and segmentation more important than ever to contain and reduce the blast radius of any potential incident.
By adopting a Zero Trust framework for OT, organizations significantly improve their ability to limit disruption, detect intrusion early and respond rapidly.
4. The problem of legacy systems in defense networks
A recurring concern across AACE was the burden of legacy systems. Many OT environments rely on decades-old hardware and protocols.This reflects a wider challenge across Air Force and DoD networks. Ageing equipment, outdated architectures, and fragmented systems create an attack surface that is difficult to secure and even harder to modernize.
Legacy infrastructure often lacks the foundational security needed for today’s approach, such as micro-segmentation, Zero Trust enforcement and continuous monitoring. As a result, it can introduce blind spots, increase network complexity and hide vulnerabilities that adversaries can exploit.
To reduce operational risk, teams need visibility to pinpoint misconfigurations and prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities, even when legacy systems cannot simply be retired. While long-term efforts to upgrade continue, there is the urgent need to segment and isolate these systems to limit lateral movement and protect the most critical parts of the network.
Strengthening resilience means not only planning for modernization but also taking immediate action to secure the infrastructure that cannot yet be replaced.
5. The need for strong industry partnerships
A key message from the conference was that the U.S. DoD can’t achieve the scale of modernization and resilience needed without strong industry partnerships and public-private sector collaboration.Partners play a critical role in several areas:
- Network modernization - helping transition outdated infrastructures to secure, scalable, Zero-Trust-aligned environments.
- Automation and continuous network visibility - enabling teams to detect vulnerabilities and anomalous behaviour in real-time.
- Attack path mapping - to identify and prioritize the most exploitable weaknesses, enabling faster and more effective remediation.
- Accelerating readiness - supporting CORA assurance by prioritizing mission-critical systems and risk.
By collaborating with partners and leveraging solutions that align with the defense industry’s evolving approach to resilience, teams can strengthen their security foundations and build proactive defenses to maintain mission-critical operations.
Titania’s award-winning Nipper solutions focus exclusively on physical and virtual routers, switches, firewalls and wireless access points. Powered by proprietary virtual modelling technology and using penetration-tester methodology, Nipper solutions analyze network device configurations the way Advance Persistent Threat (APT) groups do, identifying misconfigurations that create attack paths regardless of patch status.
These capabilities empower network teams to find and fix the few vulnerabilities that pose critical threats - before attackers exploit them.
Our dedicated solution for CORA assessments operates without needing any network connection – meaning it can be deployed swiftly and without risk. Reducing audit times by up to 80%, Nipper Resilience analyzes config files for routers, switches, firewalls and wireless access points to pinpoint any non-compliance with the latest STIGs. It provides an actionable report within a matter of hours that shows every KIOR on every device assessed.
Build a ready, resilient and compliant network
To find out how Nipper solutions can support your resilience goals, help your team prepare for a CORA assessment or to request a personalised demo, please contact enquiries@titania.com
Author
James Fanning brings more than five years of experience in global sales across multiple markets to his role as an Account Executive at Titania.
