For the Navy, the project of reducing and consolidating disparate IT networks has been a work in progress literally for decades. But the service has seen significant progress over the last several years.

In the late 1990s, there were upward of 6,000 networks performing various functions. By 2010, that number had come down to about 1,200, and a decade later, it fell to 250. This year, there are 124 discrete IT environments across the DON, and officials want to further reduce that to below 100 by the end of 2026.

“We had business systems mixed with research, development, test and evaluation with tactical training ranges — so business and warfighting was all intermixed on the shore side of the house. And we realized that we needed to do differently because we were spending an awful lot of duplicate dollars there to be able to deploy and maintain and sustain these systems,” Scott St. Pierre, the Navy’s director of enterprise networks and cybersecurity, said during Federal News Network’s DoD Modernization Exchange 2026.

And those network consolidation efforts have gone hand in hand with data center consolidation as the Navy’s total inventory has fallen to 148, with a target of 123 facilities by the end of this year.

“When we’re finalized, we don’t know what the right number will be. It will be as we continue to deconstruct the network environments that we’ll be able to settle on what’s the right combination of on-premises and off-premises,” St. Pierre said. “But we are taking advantage of what the cloud offers and moving as much of our stuff to the cloud, to mesh networks and modern capabilities as we possibly can.”

St. Pierre said the Navy’s early stages of network and data center consolidation were more straightforward, in part because Navy organizations each managed their own business networks, which could be more easily migrated to a common platform.

“Early on, it was easy because each individual organization had their own business networks. And some of those were multifunctional constructs. Those that were business were easy to move to the Navy Marine Corps Intranet. Over the course of time, it became NMCI. Now it’s called NEN, the Navy Enterprise Network,” St. Pierre said.

As consolidation progressed, challenges increased in complexity. The Navy had to address the intricacies of mixed-use networks, funding constraints, and physical requirements of certain workloads. Also, some capabilities ashore are, by design, exact replicas of afloat systems.

“Our greatest challenge is that deconstruction so that we can figure out which workloads need to go to the cloud, which workloads need to be on prem because of their physical presence,” St. Pierre said. “A lot of our test and evaluation capabilities ashore emulate and are the exact replicas of what we have afloat. Consider the “Apollo 13” movie where the engineers gathered everything up that was on the spaceship and they dumped in front of the lead engineer, and he says, ‘This is all they’ve got.’ So our land-based test sites are physical entities that emulate everything aboard ship. So we know that those will be left at the end of the day.”

And the Navy wants to find the right balance between minimizing unnecessary redundancy while still keeping failover and continuity of operations (COOP) capabilities.

“We want our ability to do COOP. So some of that will remain, so as to provide us with those duplicate capabilities,” St. Pierre said.

But network consolidation has yielded numerous benefits, he said, including improved usability, as consolidation has meant modernized hardware and software. The process of starting up and logging into a Navy-owned computer, for example, instead of taking multiple minutes, is getting much closer to consumer experiences in the private sector.

“First and foremost, it’s usability. Because our new hardware is the latest technology, we’re seeing much greater speeds and ability to access applications. We aren’t sitting and waiting for 3, 5, 10, 15 minutes for a computer to boot up. We’re seeing a near instantaneous startup and logon procedure,” St. Pierre said. “It’s much simpler, much improved usability for our workers. And that’s important because that’s one of the things that they oftentimes identify as, ‘I’m tired of having to wait for my computer to boot up,’ and they go to greener pastures to go work in industry because industry typically does have the latest and greatest.”

By eliminating duplicate systems and centralizing on enterprise services, the Navy has reduced overall spending and improved accessibility. Everyone accessing the same, up-to-date applications increases operational efficiency and reduces the burden of bespoke support for multiple legacy systems.

“By eliminating duplication of capabilities, we’re driving down the cost. We’re moving to enterprise services because, again, our ability to access quickly those thick clients, as we call them, where everybody’s using the same applications, significantly improved over the late ‘90s, early aughts where our compute capacity and capability wasn’t quite as good as it is today,” St. Pierre said.

Network modernization has been guided by a published blueprint, now in its second major iteration. The document sets forth both technical and cultural goals for Navy IT leaders and their industry partners.

“Really, what the blueprint is, is one, a mission statement that says we need to deliver and sustain secure, interoperable and effective mission performance. It’s a shift in mindsets, a shift in culture that’s focused on delivering mission performance first and foremost,” St. Pierre said.

Incremental software development, rather than waterfall methodologies, lets the Navy deliver new network functionality in smaller, more manageable steps. Security and interoperability remain as critical pillars supporting all modernization activities. The blueprint signals to all stakeholders, including the industrial base, the need for integration and performance at every network level.

“If the mission performance is not secure, if it’s not interoperable, which means we have to integrate applications to work together for harmonious multimission capabilities, and if it’s not effective, then we failed in delivering to the sailor the capabilities that they need to be able to be performant out at sea,” St. Pierre said.

A principal purpose of the modernization blueprint is to establish and enforce enterprise architecture standards across the Navy. Individual commands historically developed their own network solutions, but central standards now focus modernization efforts on enterprise capability and interoperability.

“So the second thing that the blueprint does for us is it establishes the enterprise architecture. How do we bring order from chaos? In the past, it’s always been individual commands looking at the clock and saying, ‘I need to deliver this. I need to deliver it now.’ And so working very well-intentioned people getting capability out there,” St. Pierre said.

The Navy’s integrated modeling environment (IME) now provides a common modeling and collaboration platform across all five systems commands. St. Pierre said the IME approach improves integration, enables shared use of design and modeling tools and strengthens security. Model-based systems engineering is one key outcome, allowing rapid advancement toward data, software and information standardization.

“They’re also able to take a look at how integration impacts security because, again, they’re modeling those environments and the capabilities that they’re developing,” he said.

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