Navy’s Top IT Official Barry Tanner to Keynote POC’s 2026 Navy Summit
- Event set for Aug. 27 at the Falls Church Marriott Fairview Park in Virginia
- Acting Navy Secretary Hon. Hung Cao also keynotes, alongside panels on autonomy at scale and digital shipbuilding
- Tanner expected to speak to zero trust, data security and AI priorities shaping the Navy’s IT roadmap
Barry Tanner, acting chief information officer of the Department of the Navy, will deliver the afternoon keynote at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2026 Navy Summit on Aug. 27 at the Falls Church Marriott Fairview Park in Virginia. He joins a lineup topped by Acting Navy Secretary and Wash100 winner Hon. Hung Cao, with sessions throughout the day tackling autonomy at scale, commercial integration into maritime operations centers and the software stack behind next-generation shipbuilding.
If you want to do business with the Navy or have an ongoing partnership and want to deepen the relationship, this GovCon networking event is unmissable. Save your spot now!
Who Is Barry Tanner?
Tanner is currently performing the duties of DON CIO, a role he moved into this spring after roughly two years as the department’s deputy CIO. He now oversees an enterprise that ran on a $13.3 billion IT budget in fiscal 2026, and he steps into the summit as the Navy pushes for a $377.5 billion FY2027 topline, a 23 percent jump tied to the broader Pentagon budget request, that includes continued investment in the technology and cyber programs under his purview. His focus areas include zero trust architecture, cyber readiness, operational resilience and continuous integration and delivery.
Before that, Tanner served as command operations officer for the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Digital and Enterprise Services, and earlier as N6/CIO and reserve component director for U.S. Fleet Cyber Command in Maryland. His private-sector background includes a decade as a senior associate with Booz Allen Hamilton‘s Strategic Innovation Group, where his work centered on IT strategy consulting, enterprise architecture and portfolio management for the defense and joint markets.
Tanner’s military career spanned 31 years across active duty and the reserves, reaching the rank of captain. He’s a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and holds credentials including a Certified Information Systems Security Professional, or CISSP, designation and Certified Scrum Master.
What Has Tanner Accomplished in His Career?
Tanner’s three decades in and around naval IT span operational commands, reserve leadership and enterprise-scale technology delivery:
- Commanded multiple reserve units, including the Naval Reserve Navy Information Dominance Forces Headquarters unit and a Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command reserve unit, each leading dozens of personnel across cyber, intelligence and information operations disciplines
- Served aboard the submarine USS Drum as a division officer and deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom with Task Force Phoenix
- Led more than 300 personnel as director of the DevSecOps Center of Excellence at PEO Digital, delivering cloud, digital workplace and cyber operations services across the fleet
- Played a central role in standing up Flank Speed, the Navy’s zero-trust-based productivity and collaboration platform, and later scaled it from 25,000 to 50,000 users within a week during an emergent operational need
- Built a specialty across cloud computing, DevSecOps, information assurance and Department of War/DON IT policy and strategy over more than a decade supporting joint and defense clients as a private-sector consultant
What Will Tanner Discuss in His 2026 Navy Summit Keynote?
Attendees can expect Tanner to lay out where the Navy’s technology dollars and priorities are headed next, and what that means for the industry partners supporting them:
- Where the Navy IT budget is going — With the Navy pushing for a larger FY2027 topline, GovCons will want to hear how Tanner plans to direct IT and cyber funding toward enterprise services, zero trust and AI rather than the legacy systems the department has been working to retire, and where that leaves room for new contract opportunities.
- How far zero trust extends next — Tanner has previously pointed to Flank Speed’s strong marks in a Department of War zero trust assessment as a foundation, not a finish line; expect him to speak to what’s next as those principles extend into shipboard and weapons systems, an area still largely untapped by industry.
- What “secure enough to share” looks like — Tanner has argued that data-level security, rather than network boundaries alone, is what lets the Navy combine information across classification levels. For contractors building data and analytics tools, that’s a signal of where demand is likely to grow.
- How Cyber Ready reshapes compliance work — Tanner has framed ‘Cyber Ready’ as a shift from static compliance checklists to continuous, real-time system monitoring, a change that could open opportunities for firms offering automated assessment and telemetry tools over traditional ATO support.
- Where AI and agentic tools fit into daily operations — Beyond generative AI, Tanner has flagged autonomous “agentic” tools, like the Amelia help-desk bot at the Naval Enterprise Service Desk, as a growth area; contractors should listen for which use cases he expects to scale next and where the Navy is looking for outside help to get there.
Why Attend POC’s 2026 Navy Summit?
Beyond Tanner and Cao, the 2026 Navy Summit includes panels on integrating commercial capabilities into maritime operations centers, modernizing enterprise networks for information warfare readiness and a lunch session on the future of unmanned surface and undersea vehicle partnerships between the Navy and industry. For GovCons tracking where Navy IT dollars and priorities are headed next, the lineup offers a rare single-day view into the thinking of officials shaping that direction, from the secretary’s office down to the fleet-level commands executing on it.
Registration and additional details for the Potomac Officers Club’s 2026 Navy Summit are available on the event’s official page. Count yourself among the GovCon titans represented at this critical conference.
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