MGT 7-1.indd - KMI Media Group

less access to this worldwide heterogeneous
GEOINT data domain for posting, discovery,
retrieval, synthesis/integration, exploitation
and value-added update posting. They
also require minimal latency in the content
currency of this data domain to include
value-added post-processing. Virtualization,
thus cloud architectures, provides an excellent
architectural pattern—albeit more of a
metaphor—to satisfy these customer needs,”
Cuppan said.
Cuppan’s caveat—that cloud computing
is still more of a metaphor than a finite construct—rests
primarily on the lack of security
and standards for this fast-growing but
nascent technology. “Our concerns regarding
security are sizable. As the myriad missions of
the NSG often operate within multiple high
security domains, we cannot have our data
literally ‘disappear into the clouds’ when it is
processed or exploited,” he said.
This gives rise yet again to the time-honored
IT quandary about the balance of security
and flexibility. With cloud computing,
the quagmire looms ever larger, given the
lofty but still uncertain promise of this new
framework to deliver concurrently not just
flexibility and reliability, but also accessibility,
security and the highest possible scalability.
“Securing our data/knowledge may in fact
impede accruing the processing benefits of
the cloud. Conversely, the absence of processing
control responsibilities levied on users—a
desired attribute of cloud architecture—may
undermine our requisite positive security
controls,” Cuppan said.
As a result, cloud architectures will levy
heavy responsibilities on their supporting
infrastructures, which will define and probably
innovate the way secure, standardsbased
cloud computing is structured for the
defense and intelligence community. “The
requirement to implement comprehensive
data, attribute-level security and digitalrights-management
capabilities appears certain.
Thus, not just any infrastructure may
be eligible for cloud processing membership.
This may certainly narrow down viable extant
infrastructure candidates,” he said.
A flurry of commercial market activity
revolving around cloud computing this year
raised high expectations, while the realities of
what it will take to deliver on them remain to
be seen. “Cloud computing as a technology
framework has evolved so quickly from a perfect
storm—a lack of power, space and funding
that focused people to share and optimize.
It exploded to prominence before anybody
had enough time to codify the standards and
12 | MGT 7.1
security for it, but industry is
working quickly to figure out
the solutions to these challenges,”
said Robert Ames,
director, deputy chief technology
officer, IBM Federal.
Prominent commercial
cloud introductions in
2008 included Microsoft’s
Windows Azure, an offering
that competes with Amazon.
com’s Elastic Compute Cloud
with the flexible combination
of software and services
that characterize cloud computing.
Google introduced
the Google App Engine for
dynamic scalable Web serving,
storage and automated load
balancing. Amazon, meanwhile,
announced Amazon
CloudFront, a self-serve, payas-you-go
Web service for content
delivery with low latency
and high data-transfer speeds.
STANDARDS GROUPS
While industry developments
outpace standards and
security progress, established
standards groups have delivered
the technology on which
NGA operates. “The NSG is
based heavily on standards
and services for geospatial
information discovery, access
and general transactions as
published by the Open Geospatial
Consortium (OCG),”
said Cuppan.
Transactional services
that are part of the OGC’s
Spatial Data Infrastructure
(SDI) and Sensor Web Enablement
(SWE) standards suites
assume highly distributed
Web-based data and metadata,
databases, sensors, collectors
and processing capabilities
across the NSG. As a result,
NGA clients can discover and
access information, such as sensor-to-sensor
syndicated alerts, without any awareness
of the underlying infrastructure delivering
this capability, one characteristic of cloud
computing.
Meanwhile, the Open Grid Forum (OGF)
has been developing international standards
Robert Ames
roames@us.ibm.com
Sam Bacharach
sbacharach@opengeospatial.org
George Percivall
gpercivall@opengeospatial.org
Bob Lozano
bob@appistry.com
to hasten the adoption of grid
computing and other distributed
technologies such as
virtualization, SOA and cloud
technologies. IBM, Intel and
Microsoft are members of the
OGF.
The OGC has been working
with the OGF to develop
standards for cloud computing
in geospatial technology.
The two groups developed Web
Processing Service (WPS), a
standard method of workflow
to process raw data into more
valuable information for decision-support
systems.
“WPS will identify a feature
in an image, for example,
to make the image smarter
and more relevant to the task.
It will grow image processing
in the geospatial market,” said
George Percivall, OGC chief
architect.
The OGC adopted WPS as a
standard last year. “We’re now
close to finishing the work on
WPS,” said Sam Bacharach,
OGC executive director.
Industry acceptance of
WPS is widely expected. “WPS
would be an element of any
geospatial compute processing
cloud,” said Kraska. “But
with that standard, you still
don’t have a cloud. You still
need self-healing and automated
management to have
a cloud.”
There is also a difference
between standards for interoperability
and interaction. “The
OGC has provided good standards
for application-to-application
interoperability. But
standards for application-toapplication
interaction are the
necessary ground-up building
of the SOA environment for
cloud computing in geospatial,”
said Bob Lozano, chief
strategist and founder of Appistry.
As with most geospatial information
and image processing, WPS requires significant
compute power, which is where
cloud computing could support the process.
“Data compositing as performed by WPS
may be computationally intensive and need
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