Today, Defense Unicorns, the leader in airgap software delivery for national security mission systems, announced it has been awarded a contract to support the U.S. Navy’s Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES) Next Generation modernization effort. As the Navy’s Program of Record for afloat network infrastructure, CANES is deployed on ships, submarines, and shore sites, with Defense Unicorns bringing its airgap-native UDS platform to rapidly deliver software and cyber resilience across the fleet.
The Challenge: Modernization at Sea
Today’s shipborne networks struggle under the weight of bulky systems, resource constraints, and integration bottlenecks, preventing modernization velocity from matching operational needs. Software updates can take months, and field support is expensive and inflexible. Meanwhile, operators face a mounting burden from unintuitive systems, administrative downtime, and cybersecurity threats, all under the growing urgency to make ship refits faster and less manpower intensive.
Defense Unicorns’ effort directly supports strategic Naval technology priorities, including DevSecOps, Zero Trust Architecture, and resilient edge computing, as recently outlined by the Department of the Navy’s Chief Information Officer.
UDS: Purpose-Built for Disconnected Operations
Defense Unicorns does this through UDS, a proven, airgap-native DevSecOps platform, purpose-built for disconnected and classified environments. With a declarative infrastructure-as-code model, robust automation, and modular delivery, UDS allows the Navy to integrate software once and deploy anywhere, scalable across submarines, destroyers, carriers, and every mission platform in between.
Software that once took months to field can now be packaged and deployed in days. Sailor-driven operations are supported through intuitive command line interfaces and mobile app workflows. Built-in zero-trust architecture enables secure operations across multiple enclaves, while SBOM-driven provenance ensures that updates remain verifiable, even in denied, degraded, intermittent, or limited (DDIL) communications environments.
