Why the Cloud? Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination

Watson Crowdsources Cloud Computing

By G C Network | October 20, 2016

Recently I’ve been doing quite a bit of analysis work using the IBM Watson cognitive business platform. The really exciting thing about this opportunity is the way data can seem…

New Horizons® Delivers CloudMASTER®

By G C Network | October 17, 2016

For over 30 years, New Horizons has provided more than 30 million students with industry-leading technical training that delivers the most relevant and intuitive computer courses and certifications. They are…

See You At RSA Conference 2017!

By G C Network | October 11, 2016

JUST ANNOUNCED!! I am personally excited to be delivering the (ISC)² CCSP Two-Day Crash Course at RSA Conference 2017! “The current state of cybersecurity means there are many opportunities for the…

#KnowYourData: The Key to Business

By G C Network | October 7, 2016

Last week’s Strata-Hadoop conference in New York, NY was showcase of how big data is redefining business. Every company, every demonstration and every conversation highlighted how data is driving the…

A New Chapter: “Cloud Musings en español”

By G C Network | October 5, 2016

Since May 2010, “Cloud Musings” has demonstrated, educated and celebrated the use of advanced technology in business. Specific subjects are sometimes varied, but cloud computing and cybersecurity seem to have…

Military Tips On Business Resiliency

By G C Network | September 28, 2016

Photo credit: Shutterstock A steel bar is resistant to stress and is capable of maintaining its form while bearing large loads. While steel is also known as one of the…

Meet Ameet Bakshi: The Insurance CloudMASTER®

By G C Network | September 25, 2016

Powered by Singapore-based Big Data start-up Crayon Data, BigData-MadeSimple.com tapped the insurance industry as being at the forefront of integrating cloud technology into their digital eco system. As stated in…

Understand The Language Of Data: Strata+Hadoop World and TAP

By G C Network | September 19, 2016

Our world is driven by data.  It may speak in whispers, but it can also scream insight and information to those that understand it’s language. This is why I’ll be…

Transformative Training for Hybrid Cloud

By G C Network | September 13, 2016

Figure 1- Shawn Bolan, Technical Training Manager, New Horizons of Nebraska, https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawn-bolan-96b8a9103 In a recent CloudTech article multi-cloud, or hybrid cloud, strategy was heralded as “…transformative for businesses, allowing them…

Surviving the coming “Hackerpocalypse”

By G C Network | September 6, 2016

Photo credit: Shutterstock With all the excellent training available on television today, we are all now well prepared to deal with the coming Zombie Apocalypse.  Our failure as a society…

So why is the intelligence community so interested in cloud computing? Three letters: PED (Processing, Exploitation, Dissemination). Take these two real life examples from the publishing industry.

Jim Staten of Forrester Research provided an example of how the New York Times leverage the cloud. The Times wanted to makes its historic archives available for online access. They needed to process 11 million articles and turn them into .pdf files. Initial estimates outlined that hundreds of servers and about 4 Tb of storage would be necessary. The IT organization at the Times estimated a months-long delay before beginning, the need for a significant budget and highlighted the difficulty of locating the computing resources. The project manager give Amazon Web Services a try and kicked off 100 EC2 instances and 4 terabytes of S3 storage. The job was finished the next day with a total cost of $240.

Another hard example comes from the Washington Post. Peter Harkins, a Senior Engineer at The Washington Post, used the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to launch 200 server instances to process 17,481 pages of non-searchable PDF images into a searchable online library. With a processing speed of approximately 60 seconds per page, job was completed within nine hours and provided web portal access to the public 26 hours later. Harkins ruminates, “EC2 made it possible for this project to happen at the speed of breaking news. I used 1,407 hours of virtual machine time for a final expense of $144.62. The database of Hillary Clinton’s 1993-2001 Schedule is publicly available at: https://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008/clinton-schedule/.

Examples like this show how cloud computing techniques can be used to revolutionize PED processes. By increasing the use of automation and focusing our analyst on higher level exploitation tasks, near-real time exploitation and dissemination of critical intelligence products may be enabled in the very near term with cloud computing.

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G C Network