“Man, this sucker is blazingly fast!” This was the highest compliment a US Central Intelligence Agency analyst paid to his CTO.
Speaking on “Using Enterprise/Private Cloud Capabilities in the US Intelligence” at the 7th Cloud Expo in Santa Clara (1-4 Nov, 2010), Ira A. (Gus) Hunt, Chief Technology Officer for the Chief Information Officer in CIA, revealed how cloud computing has brought the agency unprecedented “peta-scale capabilities for peta-scale problems”.
The agency’s focus through the coming financial year (2011) is to continue accelerating discovery through visual analytics. For its purposes, “boolean is broken”; and with cloud computing, analysts can now “connect the dots”, run enhanced data analytics and visualization faster, so they can “stop the next underwear bomber”. This has transformed what used to take hours into seconds.
Moving forward, Hunt will have a deeper focus on improving intelligence quality: in FY 2012, Hunt plans to limit surprise through smart data; and in FY 2013-2015, he’ll be directing his efforts to detecting patterns through mass correlation.
“Cloud,” Hunt asserted, “is not just infrastructure – it’s an ecosystem.” This “tectonic technology shift” comprised of a new strata of analytics, widgets and services, security, enterprise data management, and “have it your own way” infrastructure. However, beyond technology, this ecosystem also entailed having the right people and skills, architecture governance, process, ruthless standardization, complete change in application development strategies, the necessity to think small and think horizontal, as well as reconsidering costing models and contracting models.
Hunt also touched on the architectural aspects of the security parameters the agency has built around its private cloud ecosystem, and how the “future for [the CIA] is encryption everywhere”. The agency has successfully leveraged a mixture of cost-efficient open source and off-the-shelf options. He related how he had sticker shock for one of his recent private cloud-project RFPs and urged traditional software vendors to reconsider their pricing models, especially since “college kids are already developing” comparable products through open source.
Hunt, who is responsible for setting the strategic technology direction to enable CIA’s missions, concluded with advice for his audience: “pick a battle you can win, one that matters to the mission, and set the stage for the next step”.
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