IBM's Air Force Cloud: A worthwhile project

Focus on security, scale, and analytics

It is easy to become cynical around all the Cloud Computing hype we hear on a daily basis. That said, it is clear to me that there is a tremendous amount of capital and human resources working on cloud computing so the likelihood of future cloud computing success is quite high.

Case in point: In early February, IBM announced that it is working with the U.S. Air Force to design and develop a "mission-oriented cloud architecture for cyber security." In this case, the IBM/Air Force cloud will act as a huge security analytics engine as it monitors network traffic patterns and IP packet content across the vast Airforce network. The goal is to deliver real-time network security data for event detection, remediation, and flexible policy enforcement to keep the Air Force network up and running in the event of a massive cyber attack. Sort of a cloud-based super SIEM and network configuration engine.

This is just the kind of project that will help move cloud computing from concept to production because:

1. It starts with a POC. This isn't a typical massive government contract that may never take hold (i.e. remember the Boeing "smart border?) but rather a proof-of-concept where both IBM and the Air Force have skin in the game. As such, both organizations are putting some of their best resources into the mix.

2. Security is part of the focus. The Air Force cloud must be extremely secure and tamperproof or the bad guys will disrupt operations or try to usurp command-and-control. This type of security demand trusted authentication between nodes, extremely tight administrator access control, data integrity, and data encryption at all points. Ambitious? Yes but exactly what's needed to address cloud security.

3. Analytics capabilities demand burstable processing. When a nation state launches a multi-front cyber attack, network activity will skyrocket. At the back-end, the analytics engine must be able to deal with this immediate scaling need. The only way to cope with this is either build a compute architecture for peak scaling needs (i.e. way over normal capacity) or have shared burstable capacity that can be dedicated to analytics during an attack. By choosing the burstable capacity course, IBM and the Air Force will likely create technologies applicable in the broader market.

There is no massive DARPA project around cloud computing (at least none that I know of) so innovation depends upon other types of investment. The Air Force/IBM project seems like an effective model to me. Hopefully, this partnership will bear fruit that improves Air Force network security in the short term and paves the way for cloud computing for other big analytics applications over time.

• IBM
• SIEM
• USAF