Servers at Kunsan Air Base in Korea. Hybrid cloud models, like those at AUSA 2020, offer a resiliency beyond physical infrastructure in one location. (Mackenzie Mendez / Air Force)
ALBUQUERQUE: IBM, General Dynamics, and BAE Systems encouraged the Army consider flexible, supplier-agnostic cloud infrastructure. In an era of cloud contracting defined by the $10 billion gorilla that is the JEDI cloud contract, smaller players in the cloud space see a secondary market built for resiliency, with cloud-based services that can be moved from system to system.
“Relying on one public cloud alone locks you in, locks into only one company’s innovation,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna at the 2020 Association of the United States Army conference. “It’s a monocloud.”
Krishna’s pitch specifically was about the unique features comparative Davids can offer the Army, while still working alongside the Goliaths. Part of IBM’s bid for cloud relevance was the ability to incorporate Watson, its famously Jeopardy-winning AI platform, as a kind of analytical tool that can work within the infrastructure of other clouds by other vendors. Hosting and relying on data in an IBM cloud, then, means the whole package could move between the major players, like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
One way to ensure that information, uploaded to the cloud, remains useful as it is ported across services is to code the user interface into that same cloud package.
“Without infrastructure as code, you have to log in to a provider User Interface, click around, configure it, use their cloud resources,” said Peter Virador, Chief Cloud Architect for General Dynamics. “Great, if just starting, but best practice in terms of speed of deployment is to declare to the cloud via its API what you want the environment to look like, describe the environment by code.”
IBM and General Dynamics both devoted exhibitor webinars to their cloud offerings. BAE Systems opted instead for a virtual booth, highlighting the company’s Federated Secure Cloud. All three are Hybrid Cloud services, where the main service and features are offered by the primary contractor, while the cloud itself plays nice by storing that specific data within other, larger cloud services.
Among BAE’s specific offerings are the ability to customize a cloud that can work with authorized classified networks, while still supporting unclassified work.
This hybrid cloud market is an acknowledgement that, for the most part, the physical material of the cloud, the connected servers and data centers operated by the giants in the field, are an infrastructure on which the rest of the cloud market is built. This is true even among the giants, as Microsoft acknowledged when announcing that its Azure Orbital service also used cloud servers provided by Amazon Web Services.
For the smaller players, what they aim to offer is valuable, portable experiences within those larger clouds. Here their smaller size is especially useful, because it gives the companies experience porting data between services, and offering tools without having to build those features into hardware. As the military writ large looks to commercial innovation for its data management needs, these vendors are hoping it is drawn towards the models of the cloud already built for resiliency.
“Every organization will become an AI organization, not because they can, but because they must,” said Krishna.
