IBM Helps NATO To Reach For The Cloud

IBM is embarking on a large international project with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The company will show NATO how to migrate its wildly disparate computer systems to cloud computing.

NATO will then be able to take that information and promote more data sharing and cost efficiency among its 28 nation-state members.

Bigger Enterprise Than Normal

The goals are the same as most virtualisation initiatives: to save capital and operating costs, to use less electricity and to make systems run more efficiently on several levels. As one might imagine, this international effort represents a much larger challenge than a typical enterprise project.

NATO’s Allied Command Transformation (ACT), in announcing that it has selected IBM for the strategic IT project it already had under way, said that it wants to gain experience in improving data centre efficiency and to increase data sharing by its member nations.

The IBM-powered initiative will enable the 61-year-old organisation to plan, build and demonstrate a new cloud computing model. This would allow the organisation to consolidate and integrate its IT capabilities and deploy them for critical command-and-control programmes.

For its part, IBM will develop a cloud computing system that will share a common operating environment across many mission processes. By aggregating and sharing disparate computing resources, from networks to servers to storage, the cloud computing model will help NATO to deploy IT capabilities more broadly, quickly and cost-effectively.

The ACT group is charged with arranging and deploying future projects for NATO. Its IT section is headed up by Johan Goossens, director of  the Technology & Human Factors Branch.

“Every physical location in NATO basically has a mini-data centre,” Goossens told eWEEK. “Virtualisation and cloud offer some good opportunities for us. We’re looking at two [goal] aspects here: The first, of course, is financial. With dwindling budgets, we’ve got to do more with less. So the idea of consolidating data centres in clouds is very appealing.”

Interoperability A Key Goal

There also is an interoperability argument. Goossens said, “There are 28 nations plus NATO itself as an overarching organisation. The way we do procurement and investment is very decentralised and nations are very independent. So with technologies like virtualisation and cloud around the corner, there was a real risk here of 28 nations doing things 28 different ways.”

His group’s mission, as Goossens sees it, is this: “Can we, in this federated world which is chaotic at times, still capitalise on cloud computing to: a) save money and reduce costs, and b) improve interoperability, so that the data sets can be connected better than they are today?” he asked.

In doing the research for this project, Goossens came up with a rather surprising statistic.

“If you look at the personnel ratio in NATO, very often you see almost a 1:1 ratio between a support person and the number of servers we have. Whereas the industrial rates are completely different,” Goossens said. “So there’s a financial argument as to why we wanted to look at cloud computing.”

In this project, IBM is producing a small-scale case study so NATO can learn the right recommendations for future IT procurement.

“We’re not looking only at on-premises private clouds but, potentially, for outsourcing non-secure activities to public clouds,” Goossens said.