BY CHERYL GERBER, <strong>MGT</strong> CORRESPONDENT 10 | <strong>MGT</strong> 7.1 www.<strong>MGT</strong>-kmi.com
Cloud computing, the increasingly popular IT concept that uses a cloud to symbolize the Internet as the data and application services provider, shielding users from the underlying complexity, is extending its reach into the world of geospatial intelligence. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency envisions establishing a GEOINT distributed computing cloud, contained within a larger, high-performance cloud, to achieve many of the architectural objectives in the Department of Defense and intelligence community missions. Brian O’Toole NGA’s interest in otoole.brian@geoeye.com virtualization technology for storage, networks and server processing, and its alignment with service-oriented architecture (SOA) objectives advocated by DoD and the director of national intelligence, are paving the way toward consolidated cloud computing strategies for geospatial information. This comes at a time when geospatial image providers, such as GeoEye and Digital Globe, have experienced swelling demands. “The key trends are speed and volume. The volumes of data will continue to rise, along with the demand for increased response time www.<strong>MGT</strong>-kmi.com and larger, higher resolution areas,” said Brian O’Toole, GeoEye chief technology officer. DoD and intelligence clients not only require more images faster; they also want better, more useful images. “The military wants larger areas that can be accommodated by one image, so we need to put multiple images together without any visible break lines between the images, to produce orthomosaics and orthoimages. The value-add requires additional processing of the images into the equivalent of maps,” said Ray Helmering, GeoEye vice president of engineering. Such volume, speed and variety of data presuppose the need for highperformance computing and easier access to information. “We’ve seen a growing trend by the military and intelligence community to employ Internet-based solutions for Web hosting of geospatial data,” said Stephen Wood, vice president of business operations and U.S. defense sales, Digital Globe. “The sharing of geospatial data and the setting up of easily Joe Kraska accessible geospatial cloud communities is where we are headed.” Cloud computing essentially utilizes virtualization and SOA in a networked, high performance, highly scalable and easily resizable computing paradigm, adding fault tolerance for guaranteed reliability and other “ilities,” as NGA refers to them. Information is stored on network servers, but cached temporarily on demand in client environments from desktops to wireless handhelds. Similar to comparing intranets with the Internet, private clouds provide better security than public clouds. Because many terms get bandied about when the subject of cloud computing is raised, experts like to clarify. “As some technology experts believe, virtualization gives you the illusion of your own computer, while cloud computing gives you the illusion of your own data center,” said Joe Kraska, manager, federal data center research and prototype operations, BAE Systems. “And grid computing is more static, while cloud is elastic and grows.” However, elasticity and growth raise the need for sophisticated security, an area BAE is now addressing. “We are looking at ways to deploy private clouds that would satisfy our customers’ security requirements,” said Kraska. VARYING IMPLEMENTATIONS Like the industry’s varying emphases on the definition, many different cloud implementations will likely emerge, given the recognized IT benefits. “Cloud computing virtualization provides an IT avenue to achieve many of the architectural ‘ilities’ that our customer missions require: reliability, availability, scalability, agility, interoperability and so on. SOA objectives are leading our communities of interest to drive toward interoperable, Web-enabled services offerings, potentially allocated and bundled to reflect centers of excellence,” said Christopher Cuppan, National System for Geospatial- Intelligence (NSG) chief architect, NGA Office of the Chief Information Officer. Many of NGA’s worldwide data providers are, in themselves, discrete centers of excellence that could reside on a cloud platform, collectively forming clouds within a larger cloud. “Our customers require seam- <strong>MGT</strong> 7.1 | 11