Why the Cloud? Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination

Cloud Computing Price-Performance Could Vary By 1000%!

By G C Network | July 14, 2015

by Kevin L. Jackson Yes, you read that right. The price/performance of your cloud computing infrastructure could vary as much as 1000 percent depending on time and location. High levels of…

E-book: Educate Yourself With Dell Insight Partner Views on Cybersecurity

By G C Network | July 10, 2015

Data security breaches and hacker attacks on private businesses, health organizations and government agencies in the U.S. have grabbed headlines with increasing frequency, it seems. There is zero doubt about…

IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine Focuses On GovCloud

By G C Network | July 7, 2015

Today I am especially proud and honored to publicly announce my appointment to the IEEE Cloud Computing Magazine Editorial Board!  I am truly appreciative to Dr. Alan Sill and Dr.…

Is Social Media Right For Your Small Business?

By G C Network | June 30, 2015

Everyone from pre-teens to granddads, does social media today. With Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and many newer ways to stay in the know popping up every day, picking the right platform…

Rob Davies, ViON SVP, Talks about Government Cloud Computing

By G C Network | June 23, 2015

ViON solves complex enterprise problems by combining passion and agility to deliver the most effective, innovative solutions because commitment to mission success is in their DNA. One of the ways…

New Approaches for New Big Data Insights

By G C Network | June 15, 2015

by Melvin Greer Business Intelligence has matured as a core competency necessary to sustain competitive advantage. Organizations of every size and industry are generating valuable data with each interaction, and…

How to Put Public Sector Data Migration Hassles on the Road to Extinction

By G C Network | June 12, 2015

With careful planning and the right technology, Federal, State and Local Government IT Leaders can overcome fears of data migrations, breaking free from archaic procedures to lead the pack  By…

Would you build your house from a Visio diagram?

By G C Network | June 8, 2015

Would you even hire an architect that highlighted hand drawn diagrams and spreadsheets as their design tools of choice? Of course you wouldn’t. Not using computing aided design (CAD) as…

Industry leaders set cloud computing security benchmarks

By G C Network | May 28, 2015

Security has long been the No. 1 cloud computing business concern. Although the apprehension is absolutely valid, cloud computing business decision and strategies are all too often driven by the…

The Science and Art of Business Leadership

By G C Network | May 27, 2015

Business leadership is both science and art. The scientific aspects revolve around finance, organization, products and service. Artistic aspects include relationships, market trajectories and business strategies. While many focus 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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