Exploring Cloud-Based Terrain Generation Services
(Room S320B)
27 Nov 18
2:00 PM
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2:30 PM
The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer (CIO) has committed to the adoption of the data center/cloud/generating force computing environment (DC/C/GF-CE) under the DoD Risk Management Framework (RMF). The U.S. Army (Army) long-term objective of transitioning to scalable and reliable cloud-based information technology (IT) services cannot be realized unless the services are approved and secured under the RMF.
Organizations are becoming increasingly reliant on information system services provided by external organizations to conduct important missions and business functions. The Army’s numerous instantiations of applications, services, and hardware hosting locations add complexity to applications interoperability, lead to untimely data sharing between communities, perpetuate inefficient functional processes, and require significant resource investments. These external providers are often cloud-based services in the form of infrastructure, platforms, and software. The Army Cloud-Enabled Network Concept of Operations describes an operational framework for using cloud-enabled technology. A change is needed in how applications, data, and services are hosted to meet future warfighter needs and exploit the evolving, data driven, interconnected eco-system, despite resource constraints. Although this problem is being addressed for the Army’s mission command areas through the Common Operating Environment (COE) initiative, our effort builds on the work of DC/C/GF-CE for modeling and simulation (M&S) communities of interest.
In this paper we document the experiment of extending a military network (.mil) into the commercial cloud (.com) under RMF on an Army program of record. We briefly describe how we leveraged other concurrent and previous work to establish our use cases for cloud-based terrain generation services. We identify lessons learned in adopting a cloud CE for M&S training applications, and initial analysis conducted related to geospatial data pro