Why the Cloud? Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination

Great Leaders Are Ambidextrous, Are You?

By G C Network | November 17, 2014

By: Melvin Greer Managing Director, Greer Institute  There are many important characteristics of great leaders. Team players, good listeners and visionary are clear hallmarks. But being ambidextrous is required now…

Cloud Computing Advantages and Disadvantages

By G C Network | November 13, 2014

What is Cloud Computing & what are its advantages & disadvantages. Join us for this installment of our Technical Insight series as expert Learning Tree instructor Kevin Jackson examines the…

Ingram Micro Honors Veterans with a $10,000 Gift to Veterans 360

By G C Network | November 13, 2014

On Veteran’s Day, hundreds of military veterans, active-duty service members and retirees were recognized and celebrated along with family members at the third annual Ingram Micro Veterans Day ceremonies held…

What Are You Waiting For? The Cloud Era is HERE!

By G C Network | November 11, 2014

by Kevin L. Jackson (This post first appeared at https://blog.learningtree.com) The revolutionary business aspects of cloud excite me every day, but the business diversity is even more exciting. This fact…

Schizophrenic About Cloud?

By G C Network | November 5, 2014

By Kevin L. Jackson This week Dell released its first Global Technology Adoption Index (GTAI). This survey of more than 2,000 global organizations took a close look at how organizations…

Why You Need to Pay Attention to Cloud Computing

By G C Network | October 23, 2014

(This post was originally published by Learning Tree International  https://blog.learningtree.com/why-you-need-to-pay-attention-to-cloud-computing/ ) The adoption of cloud computing is revolutionizing today’s business. This trend has also elevated the importance of IT and…

Thriving in a Cloud, Big Data, Mobility and Security World

By G C Network | October 21, 2014

“The next generation of technology solutions will transform lives, businesses and economies.” This is the theme at this year’s Dell World opening keynote and this view is supported by Gartner’s…

Vets360 Founder Rick Collins Being Honored at the ‘Champions’ Leadership Conference

By G C Network | October 20, 2014

Veteran’s 360 and Rick Collins, Founder & Executive Director of Vets 360, Inc., are being honored at this year’sChampions Leadership, and Research Conference™ . This event, November 6th-7th, 2014 at…

“Cloud Musings” Joins Dell Content Provider Network

By G C Network | October 16, 2014

Cloud Musings, a GovCloud Network Property, is proud and honored to announce that we will now be serving over 3 Million Dell Community online daily viewers. Our content will focus…

Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerage

By G C Network | September 29, 2014

“Picture Ben Franklin attempting to harness energy from a lightning-filled sky. The key tied to his kite was the middleman between electricity and the ground. This book details how using…

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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