By Chris Hassett, Executive Director, Product Delivery

In a world where 30,000 websites are attacked daily – and a new attack surfaces every 39 seconds –customers need the absolute best in cybersecurity. One very successful approach is the cyber range, which offers two notable advantages:

• Ultra-Secure Network Modeling -- The ability to create a flexible, scalable – and risk-free – virtual environment where the customer replicates their own network and injects malware or other attack vehicles into this safe duplicate to reveal and fix hidden vulnerabilities.
• Topnotch Cyber Combat Training – As importantly, the cyber range provides the ideal training environment where cyber warriors learn industry-leading tactical response to combat, and stop real-world threats.

Just one catch: Cyber range contracts typically require the purchase of high-end hardware. No longer. Now you have a better option: ManTech Atlas, the world’s first independent software product empowering customers to deploy a cyber range anywhere, anytime, in any environment, hardware-free.

Inside Atlas

Atlas is ManTech-developed software, enabling users to rapidly create and deploy a digital cyber environment, scaling any number of servers, whether a few or thousands, in minutes. This special architecture has long worked hand-in-hand with ManTech’s Advanced Cyber Range Environment or ACRE^®, one of the very first cyber ranges, launched in 2017. Basically, ACRE is the hardware expertise and Atlas is the digital platform.

What’s different now – freedom from the hardware-based range model. Atlas works on any cloud platform of choice. Customers can purchase Atlas individually and use it on their own to build digital twins and create a testing, simulation and training environment. If you just want the tool to enable your own experts to work it, you can do so, the same as with a commercial service.

Atlas comes with features that make a difference:

• Speed of deployment on multiple servers
• User-friendly visualization
• A “drag and drop” interface to establish connectivity among devices
• And a robust library of familiar virtual machine (VM) templates to quickly deploy assets in a safe digital twin. To add any of these VMs, you simply drag and drop.

How are customers using this amazing software appliance today? Consider two use cases.

Taking the Right Step (or ST3P) Toward Training

Cyber warriors must have the ability to constantly hone their skills and rehearse for the mission – with or without connectivity. In one current use case, the customer combines ManTech’s Secure Tactical Edge (ST3P) platform with our Atlas Cyber Training solution. Users test their offensive and defensive skills across massive virtual networks consisting of well-known operating systems and network vendor solutions. Customizable “human-like” actors generate a multitude of individual personas to challenge defensive skills. This digitally-cloned environment provides a safe place to find the weak points before someone else does. Our solution will work independent of any network connectivity outside the platform or with a connection.

Atlas-Powered Space Range

Think of Space Range as “Atlas in the stars” – the ability to provide network connectivity for virtual satellites to stay in sync with their physical counterparts via a Space System Digital Twin. Space Range is platform agnostic, so it can run on any cloud environment, or be used with on-premise hardware, giving customers maximum flexibility to suit their needs.

Space Range is built using a Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) model that enables customers to efficiently create exact replicas of an existing cyber architecture. With Space Range, entire space, ground and network environments can be converted to Software Defined Infrastructure (SDIs) on demand, to ensure a no-touch deployment of the designated environments.

The versatility of Atlas can help virtually any customer protect their critical infrastructure via rapid deployment, development, testing and simulation to meet their most challenging needs in cyber.

For further information on Atlas, please contact [email protected].