Cloud Computing
“Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision-making, it is a burden, not a benefit.”
--William Pollard (1828-1893)
This sentiment, expressed in the 19th century, is being echoed by government and business leaders today. Twenty-first century organizations have made significant investments in sophisticated systems that can rapidly gather data from a variety of sources, then organize, process, and share the resultant information with specified users for more effective decision-making. The challenge now is to continue to make gains towards information dominance—by enhancing the tools already in place.
The Information Evolution Has Begun
Virtualization and cloud computing allows users to take the next step in the information evolution by delivering the following benefits:
- Leverage existing infrastructures more efficiently.
- Identify and reduce redundant information.
- Allocate server resources more accurately.
- Provide developers with a rapid development, test, and integration environment.
- Make use of remote management.
- Reduce costs by increasing usage across a pool of virtualized resources.
Maximize the True Potential of Your Network with Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is perhaps the most promising approach to date for realizing these efficiency and cost-saving measures, as well as for achieving the true promise of net-centric computing. FGM’s unparalleled experience in developing, deploying, and operating enterprise-wide, net-centric services gives us an excellent understanding of the benefits and risks involved in applying cloud computing technologies. We know how to realize appreciable cost savings in computing infrastructures and how to achieve information sharing benefits of net-centric implementations.
Our experience includes being the sole developer and maintainer of the DoD Metadata Registry (MDR) and Clearinghouse. MDR is the first Net-Centric Enterprise Services (NCES) capability to implement the NCES Federated Search specification, and the only NCES capability to date to demonstrate the ability to federate with other metadata registries.
Because the first versions of MDR were fielded even prior to the existence of the NCES program, FGM has demonstrated our ability to migrate existing capabilities into service-oriented architecture (SOA) environments that adhere to the principles of the DoD net-centric data and services strategy, and that support federation capabilities.
Capitalize on Your IT Resource Investments with Virtualization
Virtualization is a technique that enables organizations to group their IT resources into one flexible and manageable entity. Virtualization reduces or eliminates many application portability problems experienced in legacy approaches such as the Common Operating Environment (COE).
Because of our strong credentials in virtualization technologies and our proven ability to successfully transition capabilities to the Defense Enterprise Computing Centers (DECCs), DISA selected FGM to virtualize and transition the Strategic Knowledge Integration Website (SKIWeb) from STRATCOM to the DECCs.
SKIWeb provides a net-centric, asynchronous, collaborative event management capability to improve situational awareness for authorized SIPRNet and Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) users. It organizes event-based information into a globally accessible, operationally relevant, near real-time database enabling users to quickly and collaboratively share data, plan strategies, coordinate Courses of Action (COAs), assist in the decision making process, and adjust as necessary as situations develop.
Improve Scalability and Increase Component Reuse with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
Combining SOA components with virtualization technology to create a cloud computing solution improves the architecture’s scalability and increases component reuse to simultaneously reduce costs even further and improve application interoperability.
As an example from the NCES program, FGM incorporated traditional COTS SOA products to provide SOA infrastructure components and service offerings to the DoD community. The resulting FGM-produced components and capabilities are highly-scalable, distributed NCES infrastructure services that are hosted at multiple DECC locations and that have availability and scalability requirements engineered directly into the service offerings. Building upon experience gained through the pioneering MDR effort, to the extent possible these FGM-built applications and services provide multi-tenancy, thus enabling communities to manage their own data independently while still sharing a common infrastructure.
