LIVIN' ON THE EDGE: The Army expects to take advantage of the battlefield cloud by 2023

摘要

The Army has its sights set on cloud computing and is looking to the "tactical cloud" to bring forward the power, speed and scalability benefits of commercial cloud deployments. "We want to take the flexibility of enterprise cloud, the big commercial cloud services, and put that into the tactical theater," said Tom Sasala, director of operations and architecture and chief data officer in the Army's Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO)/G-6. The vision: to embed interconnected, high-power computing capability into a wide array of drones, soldier-worn sensors and vehicle-mounted intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tools. Rather than collect data in the field and ship it back for processing -- a time-consuming and bandwidth-intensive process -- the Army would leverage the cloud to process on the edge. So, how would tactical cloud transform the fighting force?