Why the Cloud? Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination

Interoperability: A Much Needed Cloud Computing Focus

By G C Network | February 10, 2014

Cloud computing transitions information technology (IT) from being “systems of physically integrated hardware and software” to “systems of virtually integrated services”. This transition makes interoperability the difference between the success…

Managing IaaS and DBaaS Clouds with Oracle Released

By G C Network | February 6, 2014

Over the holidays I actually spent some time reviewing the newly released “Managing IaaS and DBaaS Clouds with Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c“. This book is a step-by-step tutorial…

Veterans 360: Helping Young Combat Veterans Succeed

By G C Network | February 5, 2014

Refusing to accept the 30 percent unemployment rate for California veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, Veterans 360 (V360) offers recently-separated combat veterans the opportunity for a solid…

Veterans 360 Paves the Way with Cloud Certification Training

By G C Network | February 3, 2014

In keeping with their mission to support young combat veterans’ transition into civilian life, Veterans 360 plans to launch a free Cloud Technology Certification training program. Vets360-Cloud will give veterans…

DBT-Data is a Force to be Reckoned With

By G C Network | January 27, 2014

DBT-Data further established itself in the data storage industry as a formidable force with the $35 million dollar purchase of the state of the art Cyber Integration Center on 1175…

2014 Federal Intelligence Summit – Washington, DC

By G C Network | January 10, 2014

DBT Data and Potomac Officers Club are excited to announce that Al Tarasiuk, CIO of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), will be part of an ICITE…

3rd Annual World Congress of Cloud Computing 2014

By G C Network | January 7, 2014

Today I am proud and honored to announce that I will be participating in this year’s 3rd Annual World Congress of Cloud Computing 2014! Highlighting the theme of “Chinese Dream…

NRRC Video Series – Video 8 : Raytheon R3 Decision Support Tool and Advanced Tactical System

By G C Network | December 23, 2013

In September, the NCOIC delivered the Geospatial Community Cloud (GCC) demonstration. Sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, this demonstration showed how an interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled…

NRRC Video Series – Video 7 : Dave Boulos Demonstrates Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) Management

By G C Network | December 20, 2013

In September, the NCOIC delivered the Geospatial Community Cloud (GCC) demonstration. Sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, this demonstration showed how an interoperable, hybrid-cloud operating environment can be quickly enabled…

Just Pinched Myself ! Part of a “GovCloud Dream Team” !!

By G C Network | December 12, 2013

DBT-DATA provides reliable, flexible, and cost-effective data center solutions to federal, enterprise, and internet customers. With premier facilities in Ashburn, Virginia and the Cyber Integration Center in Harrisonburg, Virginia, they…

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