NGA Exploring "Community Cloud" With NCOIC

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is looking to leverage industry expertise through collaboration with the Network Centic Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC). NGA provides timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence in support of national security objectives. NCOIC's  mission is to facilitate global realization of the benefit inherent in Network Centric Operations.  To that end, they seek to enable continuously increasing levels of interoperability across the spectrum of joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational industrial and commercial operations.  Both organizations are looking to this collaborative effort to help enhance worldwide sharing of geospatial intelligence.

The term “geospatial intelligence” (GEOINT) means the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth. Geospatial intelligence consists of imagery, imagery intelligence and geospatial (e.g., mapping, charting and geodesy) information. GEOINT is also a crucial component to the success of international humanitarian efforts, such as tracking floods, disaster support, and peacekeeping. 

Through the Multinational Geospatial Co-Production Program (MGCPP), 28 countries share a central database for geospatial information. As a key member, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is currently exploring a strategy for enhancing the MGCPP into an interoperable resource capable of supporting multinational nation building efforts. Their immediate interest is in developing an open standards based “community cloud” that would support the 26 NATO, 10 partner and 2 non-NATO/non-partner countries of United Nations Security Council established International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. 

Current plans are to kick off this collaborative effort during the NCOIC Plenary Meeting in Brussels, Belgium, June 21-25, 2010. On Thursday June 24th NGA would like to explore how NCOIC processes and patterns could be used to achieve this goal. This 2-hr afternoon plenary session will open with NGA representative providing an overview of their challenge. NCOIC IPT and working group representatives will then provide some initial insight into how their processes and/or products could support the NGA strategy.  The session will close with the development of an action plan for developing NCOIC recommendations for presentation during the September plenary session in Falls Church, VA.

The NCOIC June plenary week will also feature addresses from three senior European organization representatives:

• Dag Wilhelmsen, Technical Director, NATO Communications and Information Systems Services Agency (NCSA)
• IGA Patrick Fermier, National co-Vice Chair, NATO Command, Control & Communications (NC3) Agency Board
• RADM Denis Trioulaire, European Defense Agency 

Registration is required for all attendees and there is no conference fee.  For complete agenda information and registration, please go to  https://www.SignUp4.net/Public/ap.aspx?EID=JUNE48E

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

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GSA, DoD and NCOIC to Collaborate on Government Cloud Computing

Yesterday, during the NCOIC Cloud Computing Workshop, collaboration seemed to be the focus as Katie Lewin, GSA Cloud Computing Initiative Program manager, and Dan Risacher, DoD Cloud Computing Storefront project lead, both offered to collaborate on cloud computing with the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC). As the interim chairman of the NCOIC Cloud Computing Working Group (CCWG), I welcomed the offer and promised that the NCOIC will do it's part and serve as their "industry panel" in this quickly evolving space.

In line with the NCOIC mission, the CCWG was chartered to collaborate and engage with other cloud activities to look at standards-based solutions specifically for government mission areas. The overarching goal is to ensure peer-to-peer cloud interoperability, improve usability/trust of the cloud and establish portability across clouds. In support of the established NCOIC Integrated Project Teams (IPTs), the CCWG will work to establishment cloud computing standards in the following mission areas:

• Aviation
• Command, Control & Communications Interoperability
• Net Enabled Emergency Response
• Sense & Respond Logistics
• Maritime; and
• Cyber Security

To accomplish it's task, CCWG member have identified current industry activities as input
sources to specific NCOIC deliverables. This roadmap will be used to initially guide the working
groups activities.

Yesterday's NCOIC Cloud Computing Workshop impressive list of speakers included:

• Katie Lewin, Chief of Staff, Program Manager, Cloud Computing Initiative GSA Office of the Chief Information Officer - Federal Cloud Initiative
• Brand Niemann - Senior Enterprise Architect, US EPA - Semantic Cloud Computing & Open Linked Data Pattern
• Dan Risacher Enterprise Services & Integration Office of the DoD CIO - Cloud Computing and the DoD CIO Storefront
• MG Stephen Gross (USAFR) NEER IPT Chair Deputy Director Deloitte & Touche Center for Cyber Innovation - Using a CloudComputing Model to Establish Net-Enabled Emergency Response (NEER) Core Services
• Dr. Craig A. Lee, President, Open Grid Forum - Driving Coordination and Progress in Cloud Standards
• Nils Puhlmann, Cloud Security Alliance - Cloud Security
• Peter Mell, NIST, Information Technology Laboratory - A Roadmap for Cloud Standards
• Robert Vietmeyer, Forge.mil Project Director - Forge.mil Overview
• John Willis - Cloud Computing Use Case Group - Cloud Computing Use Cases

For further information on the NCOIC Cloud Computing Working Group, please contact Tim Thomas, tim.thomas@ncoic.org (membership) or Patricia Perlini, patricia.perlini@verizon.net (Public Relations).
UPDATE:

During the second day of the NCOIC Plenary session the Services Working Group held a great follow-up session that included a brief from Henry Sienkiewicz, Technical Program Director, Computing Services at DISA. His Cloud Computing: A perspective, provides an excellent overview of the Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE), the GIG Content Delivery Service (GCDS) and Forge.mil, DISA's collaborative platform for software development

( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )

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NCOIC To Help FAA on NextGen

Today, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC™) announced an agreement to work together to advance the Enterprise Architecture of NextGen, FAA’s national airspace (NAS) transformation program.

The NCOIC will analyze and evaluate NextGen’s enterprise architecture views, products, plans, net-centric patterns and operational concepts. Working collaboratively, its members will develop “voice of industry” recommendations about applying net-centric standards to the NextGen procurement, as a way to achieve interoperability in the NAS and, potentially, the skies beyond U.S. borders.

According to Terry Morgan, NCOIC executive chairman, the standards recommendations, best practices and net-centric pattern development derived from this collaboration is expected to strengthen NextGen’s requirements. “Our recommendations will be founded on the thoughts of multi-national, multi-industry leaders in net-centricity.”

The NextGen enterprise architecture will be based on open standards and designed to enable network-centric operations—includes the following: delivering vital information to those who operate the NAS; speeding system development and reducing procurement cost through re-use of software, patterns and best practices; effectively bringing legacy systems into an interoperable enterprise; and supporting the seamless integration of rapidly emerging commercial technology into NextGen.

Press release

Fact Sheet

Additional information is also available online at the NCOIC website (NCOIC membership required):

FAA Q & A: https://www.ncoic.org/apps/org/workgroup/ext_engagements/download.php/12983/FAA_Q_%26_A_Posted2.doc

NCOIC member roles for FAA OTA:

https://www.ncoic.org/apps/org/workgroup/ext_engagements/download.php/12981/NCOIC%20member%20roles%20for%20FAA.ppt

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World Summit of Cloud Computing: "Enterprise Cloud Computing" work group

To leverage attendees of the World Summit of Cloud Computing, a kick-off meeting of the "Enterprise Cloud Computing" work group will be held near Tel Aviv, Israel on December 3, 2008. The stated goal of this meeting will be to exchange information about best practices, use cases, standardizations, success stories, emerging technologies, and issues in Enterprise Cloud Computing.

This clearly is a grass roots attempt towards creating a framework to facilitate the future global movement towards Cloud Computing. As put by Avner Algom of the Israeli Association of Grid Technologies:

"The rapid growth of this technology will require a trusted source of objective information to enable enterprises to understand the opportunities and risks in this area. An Enterprise Cloud Computing Group can play this role and provide value to both vendors and customers."

Bob Marcus of the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium is supporting this effort by providing questions on key issues from many enterprise and government representatives. According to Mr. Marcus, current areas of interest to NCOIC members include:

• Security of applications and data in public Clouds
• Availability, risk management, and SLAs for public Clouds
• Interoperability between public Clouds and enterprise systems
• Management and governance of services across public Clouds and the enterprise
• Best practices for migrating appropriate applications to Cloud environments
• Use cases and patterns for Cloud deployments

According to Mr. Algom, he has already receive intent interest from many groups. So far, he is expecting participation from the following organizations:

• 451 Group
• Forrester
• BMC Software
• Sun
• Amazon
• IBM
• Cohesiveft

By the way, the summit has collected quite an impressive list of speakers, including:

• Cristophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer, Google
• Paul Strong, Distinguished Research Scientist, eBay
• Simone Brunozzi, Web Services Evangelist, Amazon Web Services
• Dr. Owen O'Malley, Hadoop Architect and Apache VP for Hadoop, Yahoo
• Charles Brett, Principal Analyst, Forrester
• Nati Shalom, Founder & CTO, GigaSpaces
• Peter Nickolov, President, COO and CTO, 3Tera
• Russ Daniels, Vice-President & CTOHP Cloud Services Strategy, HP
• Jon Mountjoy, Developer Relations Manager , Salesforce.com
• Richard Zippel, Vice President of Technology in the Chief Technologist's Office, Sun Microsystems

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Cloud Package Management

In his post "Missing in the Cloud: package management", Dave Rosenberg highlights a critical issue in the adoption of cloud computing by government agencies.

"I dare say that a standard needs to be introduced--or at least a quasi-standard like we see for Linux with Yum, RPM and Synaptic (essentially flavors of the same ideal.)

Since Amazon doesn't currently offer this feature, I wonder what vendor will step in to fill this void. So far all the Cloud app guys have taken different approaches which will certainly introduce some additional complexity related to portability (which also needs to be standardized.)"

There was, in fact, quite a bit of feedback on this in the MIT Cloud Computing Survey.

Matthew Small from Rightscale agrees and puts it this way:

"It's a lot of work. Our ServerTemplate model has abstracted the configuration of the server from the base image that must be launched in the host. This provides for interoperability on public and private clouds. My assumption is that eventually there will be a standard "cloud computing unit" of measurement, but every host and vendor now has their own way of doing things and I don't expect that to stop."

"An IT architect at a large IT services company" had the following opinion on interoperability between cloud and enterprise systems:

"The handwriting is on the wall: the cloud will win. The economics are absurdly on the side of the cloud. But as enterprise architects mull things over, they'll want some backup or an alternative in the case one of their cloud providers goes down. If the payroll system is down on Tuesday, who cares? But if it's down on Friday, the enterprise will have a revolt on its hands. (And payroll has long been outsourced.) Right now no two cloud offerings are alike, so anyone indulging in the cloud is instantly locked into a vendor. For the cloud to truly create commodity computing, there must be standards. Standards that are coordinated and define various levels of service and what the interfaces look like (why can't they appear as services?) etc. This will be a hideously complex undertaking but the market will force it so that service consumers will have choice. Otherwise there is no true competition. I see this taking years, and the market will in large measure determine whose approach defines the standard. (Remember ISO OSI? It was all the rage way back when, but TCP/IP buried it in the dust via sheer force of market presence.)"

Bob Marcus and the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) are currently addressing their member concerns through discussions around the following topics:

Standardizations Needed

• APIs between Cloud layers (e.g. PaaS and IaaS)
• Interoperability across Clouds
• Interoperability between public Clouds and enterprise systems
  

Implementation Guidelines

• Best practices for migrating appropriate applications to Cloud environments
• Use cases and patterns for Cloud deployments
• Organizational support with the Enterprise for Cloud Computing
  

Robust Cloud Operations

• Security of applications and data in public Clouds
• Availability, risk management, and SLAs for public Clouds
• Governance of services across public Clouds and the enterprise

The entire list of NCOIC questions is in the SOA-R wiki. If you are a member of NCOIC, please work with the newly formed Enterprise Cloud Computing Group to provide answers to these important concerns. If you're not a member, please provide your comments here or directly to Bob Marcus at robert.marcus@sri.com. (You could also consider joining the NCOIC)

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Boeing Gives Up On Interoperable Modelling and SimulationNnetworks

Last week a Flightglobal article reported on the softening of Boeing's stance on the need to establish standards for networking protocols across the US and global defence industry. Citing the company's 2004 efforts in creating the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium "to create a body of standards for defence and aerospace firms", their position has apparently changed because open source information is sufficient to meet the objectives of most simulations and the value added by a network's density is not nearly as great as previously believed.

I personally believe that the ability to connect network through internet protocols, the rise of open systems and the viability of cloud computing technologies have just made industry specific networking protocols obsolete. I also see the inclusion of a cloud computing session in the NCOIC September Plenary speaks volumes for the future of this approach.

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Cloud Computing and the NCOIC

According to their website, The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) has scheduled a session on cloud computing at their upcoming plenary session in September. In case you haven't heard of the NCOIC, they are a industry consortium that works in tandem with customers from around the world to provide a set of tools that enable the development of network centric capabilities and products.

"The NCOIC was formed to support those who design and deliver systems for warriors, first-responders, and others as they seek to maximize information age capabilities. The NCOIC's products will continuously enhance systems and services' interoperability and operational resilience, and will reduce the cost of developing new capabilities, even as they become more prolific. For the procuring agencies, this will result in lower integration and administrative costs in the deployment of distributed systems that can interoperate easily, cost effectively and securely."

Their session, titled "Cloud Computing for Net Centric Operations" will be held on Wednesday, September 17th, from 7am - 1 pm. At the Westin Tysons Corner,7801 Leesburg Pike, Falls Church, VA 22043. According to the description, industry leaders will discuss the possible roles for Cloud Computing in future government computing architectures.

SOA-R is proud to have helped the NCOIC set up this important industry event.

You can make reservations to attend the plenary session through www.ncoic.org

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