Why the Cloud? Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination

Getting Your Network in the Cloud

By G C Network | May 25, 2016

Join us with Virtual Newsmakers on Saturday, May 28th at 11:00am for a YouTube Livestream on cloud computing. Virtual Newsmakers is a webcast show featuring virtual newsmakers, who are bridging…

Enterprise Networking in a Cloud World

By G C Network | May 17, 2016

Enterprises must rethink network management in the cloud computing world. This new reality is driven by the rise of software defined networking, the virtualization of everything and a business imperative…

The Game of Clouds 2016

By G C Network | May 13, 2016

In the mythical, medieval land of AWS, a civil war brews between the several noble Cloud Services over rulership. Meanwhile, across the sea, the former controlling dynasty, Traditional IT, attempts…

10 Ways to Flash Forward

By G C Network | May 7, 2016

Not to long ago I was honored to be included as a storage expert in the Dell ebook, “10 Ways to Flash Forward: Future-Ready Storage Insights from the Experts.” This…

The Future of Storage

By G C Network | April 28, 2016

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing a Blab on advanced storage with Daniel Newman and Eric Vanderburg.  We covered some pretty interesting points on enterprise storage…

DevOps and Hybrid Infrastructure Synergy

By G C Network | April 3, 2016

(This post first appeared in IBM’s Point B and Beyond) The definition of DevOps emphasizes collaboration and communication between software developers and other IT professionals while automating the software delivery…

Are electronic medical records worth it?

By G C Network | March 23, 2016

The use of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by medical professionals has increased dramatically. According to HealthIT.gov, 2015 statistics show that 56 percent of all U.S. office-based physicians (MD/DO) have demonstrated meaningful use…

Finding a Framework for Hybrid Cloud Risk Management

By G C Network | March 6, 2016

 (Sponsored by IBM. Originally published on Point B and Beyond) Hybrid cloud is rapidly becoming essential to today’s information technology processes. This is why hybrid cloud risk management has become…

Cancer, cloud and privacy shield

By G C Network | February 23, 2016

(Originally published in Dell PowerMore) For more than 10 years, the rapid rise of cloud computing has enabled an even more rapid application of cloud to genomic medicine. In fact,…

Hybrid Cloud Versus Hybrid IT: What’s the Hype?

By G C Network | February 3, 2016

(Originally posted on Point B and Beyond) Once again, the boardroom is in a bitter battle over what edict its members will now levy on their hapless IT organization. On…

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