Case Study: CERDEC/ARL (U.S. Army/DoD cyber defense) achieves real-time threat hunting and scalable cyber defense with Elastic Cloud Enterprise (Elastic)

Countering cyber threats with Elastic Cloud Enterprise at CERDEC/ARL

The Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center / Army Research Laboratory (CERDEC/ARL) is the DoD’s lead cyber defense organization for network and system monitoring. Facing rapidly growing data volumes, increasing encryption that reduced network visibility, and a need for distributed search and insider‑threat detection, Curtis Arnold’s team required a scalable, resilient platform to support massive ingest and enable nimble threat hunting across DoD networks.

By deploying Elastic Cloud Enterprise and redesigning their ingest architecture to stream flow, API, and application logs to central storage and ECE, CERDEC/ARL achieved immediate gains in policy enforcement, anomaly detection, threat hunting, search performance, and programmatic access. Analysts could surface risky cloud activity within an hour, Kibana visualizations improved incident understanding and retention, and the platform delivered the scalable, rapid-response capabilities needed to defend DoD environments.

CERDEC

Curtis Arnold

Chief of the Sustaining Base Network Assurance Branch