Army nearly ready to move thousands of users to BYOD, virtual desktop programs

The Army is just weeks away from finally letting a significant cadre of soldiers and employees use personal mobile devices to connect to government systems. It’s part of a much larger endeavor to create a “unified network” that relies much more heavily on cloud technologies, zero trust principles and commercial solutions.The Army has been engaged in serious testing of technologies to underpin a bring-your-own-device strategy (BYOD) since at least last year. Now, officials are ready to roll it out to an initial user base of potentially thousands of soldiers and Army civilians.The pilot project should be underway within the next 45 days, said Lt. Gen. John Morrison, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for command, control, communications, cyber operations and networks.