How the NRO can leverage Cloud Computing

Last Thursday, May 22nd, I had the pleasure of attending an Intelligence Community Executive Forum hosted by Carahsoft. The topic of this forum was ""Innovative Technology for the Intelligence Enterprise". The speakers and panelist focused on how the National Reconnaissance Office could leverage information technology in support of it's advanced mission needs. Although neither cloud computing or netcentric warfare were on the agenda, both topics seemed to be central to where the agency is heading. Comments that peak my interest are below. This was an unclassified event so there are no secrets here (I hope).

Michele Weslander Quaid
Chief Technology Officer
Deputy Chief Information Officer
National Reconnaissance Office
  • The ODNI wants the community to transition from the "need to know" mentality to a "need to provide" way of thinking. In doing this the community must move from it's mission silos towards web technology and into the netcentric world
  • The NRO is an information services enterprise with its deliverable being value added information.

Guljit Khurana
President/CEO
Centrifuge Systems

  • An event drive posture for information is now very important
  • Persistent and temporal information analysis are critical to success

Ron Flax
Solution Architect
Hewlett Packard Software

  • Industry is moving towards virtualization and automation
  • Process change is critically needed in the NRO in order to allow technology to work

Bob Lozano
Co-founder
Appistry

  • In order to build applications that work naturally in a cloud computing environment, you need to virtualize the application through the use of fabric software
  • A different approach to solving bandwidth challenges is to move the application to where the data resides instead of moving large amounts of data to the application

Tim Stewart
Chief, IT Strategy and Technology Assessment
National Reconnaissance Office

  • In order to realize the full value of virtualization, one needs to develop a real architecture. Government is not good at this which leaves the job for industry to complete.

S. K. Vinod
Co-founder and Headquarters Advocate
Xsigo Systems

  • Input/Output virtualization is an important but under use aspect of modern IT infrastructures


Lt. Col Kirk Jester
Chief of Information Assurance (IA) Architecture and Governance
National Reconnaissance Office

  • The NRO has 20-year-old systems
  • There are no real good IT architectures
  • The NRO is going back to the basics
  • The organization has lost track of it's network endpoints and has trouble defining the perimeter

Lewis Shepherd
Chief Technology Officer
Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments

  • There are 30,000 security holes in XP. Vista addresses that problem
  • Vista is a trustworthy operating system, developed with the NSA
  • The user experience is impinged by the extra security in Vista, but that is by design
  • Vista is a platform for an entire end-to-end trusted stack
  • Internet Explorer introduces security problems in the world of "mash-ups" because the browser is a multi-user system with multiple untrusted domains
  • Microsoft is a "big time" provider of cloud services. It is also working on intelligence agency clouds
  • There are approximately 500 million installations of the Microsoft operating system worldwide. When there is an operating system anomaly, these systems provide about 600,000 kernal reports a day. This forms the basis of a global early warning system for hackers and malware attacks
  • Netcentricity needs a similar low-level warning system
  • Microsoft cloud computing services will be built around MashupOS technology

Commentaires

Enregistrer un commentaire

Posts les plus consultés de ce blog

Hacking Into The Indian Education System Reveals Score Tampering

Image
Debarghya Das has a fascinating story on how he managed to bypass a silly web security layer to get access to the results of 150,000 ISCE (10th grade) and 65,000 ISC (12th grade) students in India. While lack of security and total ignorance to safeguard sensitive information is an interesting topic what is more fascinating about this episode is the analysis of the results that unearthed score tampering. The school boards changed the scores of the students to give them "grace" points to bump them up to the passing level. The boards also seem to have tampered some other scores but the motive for that tampering remains unclear (at least to me). I would encourage you to read the entire analysis and the comments , but a tl;dr version is: 32, 33 and 34 were visibly absent. This chain of 3 consecutive numbers is the longest chain of absent numbers. Coincidentally, 35 happens to be the pass mark. Here's a complete list of unattained marks - 36, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53,...
Lire la suite

Information Service and Cloud Dedicated Hosting

Image
Dedicated hosting service, dedicated server, or managed hosting service is a type of internet hosting the client leases an entire server not shared with anyone. It is more flexible than shared hosting, and organizations have full control over the server (s), including choice of operating system, hardware, etc. There is also another level of dedicated or managed hosting managed hosting is called complex. Apply complex managed hosting on physical servers, hybrid server and virtual servers with many companies choose hybrid (a combination of physical and virtual) hosting solution. There are many similarities between the standard and complex managed hosting, but the main difference is the level of administrative support and engineering the customer pays for all because of the growing size and complexity of infrastructure deployment . Steps presented to support most of the administration, including security, memory, storage, and support of information technology. Proactive ser...
Lire la suite

IBM's Blue Cloud Meets Juniper To Alleviate Cloud Computing Adoption Fears

Security and lack of an acceptable SLA are customers' top adoption fears to move to cloud computing . IBM's recent announcements to further advance their cloud computing initiative known as Blue Cloud should help alleviate these fears to some extent. IBM announced their partnership with Juniper for their hybrid cloud initiative to provide secured private cloud with better SLA. IBM also announced new offerings for the cloud - Tivoli storage as service and a new set of cloud management tools to align with what a typical CIO would look for when migrating to the cloud. In addition IBM is pushing some of their existing offerings on the cloud that customers can now use off Amazon's EC2 on pay-as-you-go subscription model . IBM has been experimenting with the concept of a private cloud for a while. One of such experiments included creating a private virtual cloud inside the firewall to deploy some of the regions of SecondLife with seamless navigation in and out of the firewall....
Lire la suite