Inside Defense
NATO must abandon decades of network-bound, proprietary command systems and shift to a cloud-based method of sharing and processing data if it wants to defend Europe against rapidly evolving drone and missile threats, a senior alliance official said in a call for sweeping policy change.
Tom Goffus, NATO’s assistant secretary general for operations, said the alliance already has enough sensors spread across member states to track many air threats but cannot exploit them because the data sits inside incompatible systems that cannot share information in real time. NATO needs a common data layer built on the cloud that can move, process and secure information at speed across nations, services and security classifications, he argued.
“This is not a technical problem,” he said Nov. 24 during a Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance online event. “It is a cultural, a process and a policy problem. And I think the answer is going to be a common data layer, or common data backbone or common data lake.”
Goffus warned the alliance cannot continue relying on closed, stovepiped networks designed for a pre-cloud era, saying that the result is missed detections and wasted investments in high-end platforms whose data cannot be accessed when needed.
