The announcement that the U.S. Air Force (USAF) has awarded IBM a contract to design and demonstrate a secure cloud computing infrastructure capable of supporting defense and intelligence networks, moves the cloud computing/security issue to a totally new level.

Whilst this is ‘only’ a project, it looks very much like the Obama administration fulfilling its intent to adopt cloud computing in the federal government. Of course the usual benefits of this are trotted out by both government and suppliers: improve IT efficiency, reduce costs, greater flexibility and so on. With this defence (or, in view of its provenance should we write ‘defense’?) application it is said the “cloud model strengthens the resiliency of mission-critical applications by removing dependency on underlying hardware. Applications can be easily moved from one system to another in the event of system failures or cyber attacks".

The risk of cyber attacks on the military has been very much in the news lately. So IBM Research’s work on advanced cyber security and analytics technologies will have a ready audience in the Pentagon.

IBM says the project will push the technology boundaries and that is believable. Look at the canvas on which the IBM team will be working. On home territory, the USAF has Air Combat Command (ACC), Air Education and Training Command (AETC), Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), Air Force Reserve Command (AFRC), Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), Air Mobility Command (AMC), with separate overseas commands covering Europe and Pacific. Remember the enormous responsibilities residing within those commands: AFGSC with a global capabilty to deliver atomic weapons and AFSPC looking spacewards. Think aircraft dropping bombs in Afghanistan while being remotely piloted from Louisiana. Think over 250 flying squadrons, nearly 100 bases, and 700,000 active military personnel around the world.

Wow! This is some challenge as the Pentagon and the whole US military infrastructure has been under attack for well over 10 years. ‘Moonlight Maze’ was the code name given to the attacks from Russia in the 1990s and ‘Titan Rain’ to the more recent campaign that appeared to come from China. In 2009 it was asserted on a CBS documentary that the whole US defense estbalishment had been electronically rolled up. Probing is occuring all the time.

It seems counter-intuitive, therefore, for the Air Force to think it can manage, monitor and secure its information more securely by using the cloud. Time after time in many surveys, users identify security as the no. 1 issue that concerns them.

However, IBM anticipates that it will be able to demonstrate an unprecedented level of security and network resiliency into the Air Force cloud design. How? Well how about advanced “stream computing” analytics as a key element? In its press release, (http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/29326.wss ) IBM says little to explain the term.

Tekplus has looked a little closer into what might be meant here. The term computing stream is used in a number of ways, but essentially it refers to a sequence of data elements made available over time. One of those ways is the data stream model, where the data cannot be randomly accessed - as on disk or memory - but must be accessed in order and can be read usually only once. There is more. IBM Research has published stuff on its System S Stream Computing System. It says it is a breakthrough technology that enables production and management of key information that is extracted from enormous volumes of potentially unimportant data.
(http://bit.ly/buLDgb)

IBM intends to couple this technology with USAF’s sensors and monitors – presumably in aircraft and satellites – to analyze the massive amounts of data flowing through its network. It aims to enable commanders to get fast, accurate insights about threats, including cyber attacks, while ensuring the network is not disrupted. And the guys making the decisions will do so with the aid of “customized executive-level dashboards”. As an old airman myself, all I can say is ‘bravo, USAF, I hope it works’. There is an old military maxim, ‘Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted’.

But, but, but, I hear my reader cry, where is the super-dooper level of security in the cloud that everyone worries about? It looks as though there will be sensors that are monitoring the health and status of the network. In the event of cyber attack, officers could automatically shift the prevention environment based on rules-based protocols. But there is also an autonomic computing resource, where virtual cloud services are managed remotely. The USAF’s cloud infrastructure will constantly be able to retune itself for optimal performance - without human intervention.

This is not the first step by the US Department of Defense into the cloud. Warren Suss in Government Computer News summarised the five efforts he knew about last fall. (http://bit.ly/cDGmPy) Nevertheless this latest announcement by IBM and USAF appears to be the most ambitious so far.