Defense Unicorns has officially announced the launch of its revolutionary new system called UDS, which marks a major bend in the road for how software solutions are delivered in the air defense space.
According to certain reports, the stated technology arrives on the scene with an ability to give mission operators the necessary means to thrive in modern warfare. Alongside that, it also brings software solutions to national security environments deployed worldwide.
Talk about UDS on a slightly deeper level, though, we must start by mentioning its take on security. Basically, UDS is committed to a 0 CVE posture with continuous monitoring, logging, and alerting across a defense-in-depth approach to cybersecurity. Furthermore, it ensures a secure runtime by closely managing and monitoring software interactions within DoD environments, environments where it verifies software components for the overarching purpose of mitigating vulnerabilities in real-time. This it does to maintain a trusted and resilient operational state.
Next up, we must get into the compliance side of things. Here, UDS satisfies up to 90% of the NIST 800-53 technical controls that program offices are responsible for in IL-4, 5, and 6 environments. Joining the same is UDS’ Airgap Native capabilities. To understand that, we must acknowledge that, as a Defense-first solution, UDS has all the tools from the beginning to support disconnected, semi-disconnected, and highly secure environments.
“The biggest threat to that vision is an ineffective US military, plagued by insecure and outdated legacy software. Here at Defense Unicorns, it is our life purpose to solve this problem once and for all. UDS is that game changing. Most of the time, defense tech is considered a late add-on for most technologies. We took the opposite approach and instead we have purpose-built UDS as a software delivery platform for the DoD,” said Robert Slaughter, Air Force Veteran and CEO of Defense Unicorns.
Another detail worth a mention is rooted in the platform’s highly-distributable nature. This particular nature reveals itself once you take into account how UDS is designed to deploy where the Mission requires cloud, on-prem, and tactical edge alike. Hence, with the given platform, software baseline can go everywhere including across contractor environments, government systems, unclassified, classified, or even SAP environments.
Not just highly-distributable, but the UDS platform is also pretty portable in its own right. We get to say so because the platform’s portability is what makes it possible for mission capability providers to develop, test, deploy, and operate in a rather rapid fashion. Markedly enough, the whole process done as promised regardless of infrastructure, supporting cloud, bare-metal, and tactical edge with uniformity.
Moving on, UDS even delivers at your disposal a decentralized infrastructure, meaning it can reduce mission dependency on single centralized solutions and is instead deployed to many environments. Such diversification goes a long distance to ensure that your mission has the assurance it requires in real wartime scenarios.
“I spent two decades in the Air Force watching technologies struggle to keep up and modernize well enough to deliver updates in air-gapped environments. I wanted to build UDS to help Defense avoid the struggle, complexity, and bureaucracy that make delivering software for national security so difficult,” said Jeff McCoy, Co-founder and CTO of Defense Unicorns.
Rounding up highlights would be UDS’ easy to navigate ecosystem, considering the platform manages most of mission systems through help from active duty, civilians, or a small number of contracting experts. This, in simple terms, would indicate that mission system operators don’t have to be technology experts to execute their work.
Among other things, we must mention that UDS was launched only after it was successfully deployed within critical systems operated by partners in the Navy, Air Force, and Space Force. During these deployments, which lasted for over six months, the platform showed a clear knack of accelerating the Authority to Operate (ATO) process. On top of that, it also maintained the entire software development lifecycle from initial development to sustained operations across dozens of scenarios, and that too, throughout multiple classified levels across the complex defense industrial support base.
