Unexpected problems arise due to increased data volume
“Data tagging is extremely important. If you don’t tag your data consistently, it’s very difficult to ensure that access to that data is consistent when you move to a Zero Trust network. ,” said Timothy Hess, Technical Lead, Identity, Credentials, and Security. Defense Information Systems Agency Access Management.
“Are tanks a physical tank used by the Army?” Are tanks something that flies in the air to fuel planes, or are they naval water tanks? Data and tagging standards are going to be very important. ”
Terry Halvorsen, IBM’s vice president of federal client development, suggested that the data ecosystem may actually be overcrowded. “Why? My data systems are not well integrated. And I copy everything. How do I choose the right process to delete some data or delete repetitive data?” Should we? We’re growing our database, so that’s becoming more difficult.”
As volumes grow, the cost of data also becomes an issue. “You’ll want to use things like deduplication, compression, and tiering your data to lower-cost media,” says Jim Cosby, field chief technology officer for NetApp’s US public sector team.
“Even if we were able to shrink 5 TB to 1 TB, which still looks like 5 TB to all apps and users, we saved 80% in cost, footprint, and time. We could probably accelerate our mission. It will be.”
learn more: The U.S. Navy is working to establish fleet-wide connectivity.
Data protection and sharing remains complex
Once you have control over that aspect of your data, whether it’s a defense or civilian organization, you need to find a way to share it securely. Technology can get in the way, said Daniel Corbin, chief of technology and deputy commander for intelligence (C4) for the U.S. Marine Corps.
“We need a common framework to share data from a technical perspective,” he said. “We typically do it the traditional way we’ve always done it, which is to buy a bunch of stuff and try to integrate it. There are a lot of challenges with this model. ”
Agencies that handle sensitive information have another problem: how to share data across networks with different security levels. “There is no cross-domain solution that allows you to do that,” said Keegan Mills, Marine Corps Systems Command engineering and cyber technology officer.
“For me, it is a serious problem, an obstacle that prevents even the development and implementation of technical solutions. It is a problem that we need to solve, and we need to solve it quickly,” he added.
read: Learn how to build a flexible and accessible data platform.
Consider sending analytics data to the edge
Rathbun believes that artificial intelligence and large-scale language modeling can help solve data aggregation problems, if not technical ones.
“But we need to rethink how we manage information,” she says. “If you’re trying to build models that can be used at the tactical edge that require data from all of these sources, you need to rethink how you store, compute, and source that data.”
Her (in her words) “blasphemous” perspective on data in general is that it probably doesn’t need to move to the edge to be useful at mission speed. “Maybe you train the model and move it to the tactical edge, consume the new data, and then bring everything back to the mothership,” she said.
“And I’m not going to do any favors to the warfighters, the Marines and sailors on the tactical front lines, because I’ve asked them to fuse data to make decisions. We have to think about manipulating data, combining data, and getting to the point where we can hide the origin of the data if something is a sensitive source.”
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