Intelligence Agencies Move Towards Single Super-Cloud

Grazed from AOL. Author: Charles Allen.

The intelligence community is developing a single cloud computing network to allow all its analysts to access and rapidly sift through massive volumes of data. When fully complete, this effort will create a pan-agency cloud, with organizations sharing many of the same computing resources and information. More importantly, the hope is the system will break down existing boundaries between agencies and change their insular cultures.

As in the rest of the federal government, lower costs and higher efficiency are the primary reasons for the intelligence world’s shift to cloud computing, said Charles Allen, formerly Under Secretary of Homeland Security for intelligence and analysis, currently a principal with the Chertoff Group, in an interview with AOL Defense. Now in its eighth month, the goal of the effort is to connect the CIA’s existing cloud to a new cloud run by the National Security Agency. This NSA-run network consists of five other intelligence agencies and the FBI. Both of these clouds can interoperate, but the CIA has its own unique needs because it must work with human intelligence, which necessitates keeping its cloud slightly separate, he said…

The NSA’s cloud will incorporate the smaller organization-wide clouds of its partner agencies. One agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates and manages the country’s spy satellites, has its own initiative to move its data to a cloud architecture. Jill Singer, the NRO’s chief information officer, recently noted that her agency’s cloud efforts plug directly into the larger intelligence community program. This allows vital satellite imagery to be shared with analysts across multiple intelligence agencies, she said…

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