Cloud at the “Tactical Edge”
What does cloud look like at the tactical edge?
Every month I find myself in a meeting about “Cloud at the Tactical Edge” or “Cloud at the Edge” and I find this to be a very interesting vertical for cloud services that I do not believe has gotten a lot of attention compared to massive enterprise cloud migrations or B2B cloud discussions that most attention is paid to in discussions and presentations. The field of “Cloud at the Tactical Edge” is almost entirely new territory for cloud vendors and there are several views on what this new territory will look like.
First, what is the “Tactical Edge” is a debatable topic depending on who you talk to. The Air Force flight line maintainer working on an A-10 on a runway may not seem to be at the tactical edge but their role and work certainly has an impact at the tactical level. The submariner performing maintenance on a pump or electrical system 1500 ft below the waves is certainly at the “edge” of cloud services. The Marine sergeant sitting in the vehicle commanders seat driving down a desert road in an up-armored vehicle attempting to navigate their convoy is at the “edge.”
For purposes of this article, the “Tactical Edge” of cloud is not necessarily the geographic 8-digit grid location where bullets are flying and shrapnel rips through the air, but rather where cloud services have never been used before in support of tactical operations. This location can be a hanger in a friendly host country, a submarine under the arctic circle, a SOCOM unit on a riverine approach to conduct a raid, or a logistics unit convoying between patrol bases in the desert.
Amazon Web Services is producing a series of physical devices in order to bring cloud services to the tactical edge. Right now the current product that is the most “tactical” is the 49.5lb Snowball Edge. While not exactly man-portable, this device enables the ability to project cloud services to the “edge” so long as there is a steady power supply. You can watch a fairly impressive video of AWS conducting explosives testing next to the Snowball Edge here. Microsoft has a very similar product to AWS called the Azure Data Box Edge.
It is only a matter of time as the miniaturization of equipment continues that cloud services will be “rucksack portable” and likely able to operate with solar power or battery only modes. Just as we saw the miniaturization of computers to desktops and then eventually laptops to tablets. So with the equipment available or soon to be available to project cloud to the tactical edge what will it be used for? How will the enterprise support cloud at the tactical edge?
The cloud at the tactical edge will likely have several different variations of usage that are only beginning to be developed. These variations may overlap or be completely independent of one another, just as weapons systems and equipment are used at the tactical edge have different overlaps and tie-ins.
The simplest usage cases will be extended legacy enterprise infrastructure to the edge of operations. For the submariner fixing equipment below the waves, the tablet he works on connects to the cloud on-board the submarine which ties into the historically used system in real-time, eliminating the need for duplication of effort and hand-jamming into the physical work-station once work is complete. The same can be said for the aviation maintenance technician working on the aircraft out on the actual flight-line, reducing the need for a permanent workstation tied into an enterprise maintenance system and all maintenance entry's can occur at the actual aircraft. [You can see a great example of this by a company Monkton using AWS here]
More complicated use cases will be using the cloud at the edge to perform computing and processing during raw data collection to decrease collection to dissemination times. Military aircraft regularly fly over intelligence collection points capturing imagery that is stored on hard-drives that upon landing are then shipped for processing. Having a cloud device in the aircraft would enable the processing of the raw collected data to be processed almost in real-time in a disconnected environment and then when the aircraft lands the aircraft cloud would upload its processed data to the larger cloud. This would decrease the time from collection to dissemination dramatically and increase the automatic actions vs. human interaction points.
A more extreme example of cloud at the tactical edge would be the the infantry unit patrolling a mega-city . The unit is collecting imagery of locals as they patrol in vehicles or dismounted and as they collect imagery it is processed by their man-portable disconnected cloud which had been updated before leaving on patrol. Previously identified hostile actors are compared to the newly collected imagery in near-real time enabling the patrol to identify and detain those individuals identified as hostile actors via image recognition.
There are many considerations and questions for how the cloud at the tactical edge that need to be addressed that are only in their infancy. How will cyber security play a role in this? How will enterprise legacy systems based in CONUS interact with cloud inputs from the edge? Will the cloud at the edge impact a units signature management in a negative way? These are but a few of the questions that will need to be addressed quickly as the cloud does become available for tactical users in operations across the globe.
The capability to field the cloud at the tactical edge is very quickly approaching reality and in some instances already realized. The infrastructure and systems in place utilizing the cloud need to quickly get up to speed to match this new capability.
For an excellent discussion of “Cloud at the Edge” find this Hudson Institute discussion transcript between leaders in the DoD and National Security domains here.
You can reach me at mpben@amazon.com if you have any questions or would like to discuss any of these topics further. Connect with me here on LinkedIn. Thank you.
