WASHINGTON: The Department of the Air Force has taken a big step toward enabling data sharing across the Air and Space Forces. Last week, the service completed four options, each with its own technical architecture, to be presented to the department’s senior leadership for review. A decision is expected in June.
Once leaders pick an option, the Air and Space Forces’ Chief Architect Office will begin building a minimum viable product (i.e., a baseline capability), according to the Department of the Air Force CAO’s Col. Peter Chiou, lead infrastructure architect, and Taylor Flaxington, lead digital architect, who spoke to Breaking Defense.
“The main premise behind all courses of action is to develop an enterprise data platform,” Flaxington says. “Each architecture supports that vision.”
The goal is to develop an architecture — essentially, models, policies, and standards that govern how data is used — that will enable the department to get the right data to anyone, anywhere, anytime, Chiou says. The project is not so much about exchanging data between platforms, Chiou adds, but rather getting data to users when and as needed.
The four potential courses of action were the outcome of the department’s first ever Data and Infrastructure Architecture Summit, a two-week event that concluded last week. The summit was the culmination of a series of weekly sprints that began in early March, when department leadership requested a review of how money was being spent on data and systems, according to Chiou.
The purpose of the summit was to bring together key stakeholders to gather input and then to “build [each potential option] out enough so they can be presented to [leaders] to choose a path,” Chiou says.
Chiou and Flaxington note the summit’s importance in “building relationships and collaborating as an enterprise team.” The Combatant Commands participated.
The task is enormous, given the department’s roughly 50 petabytes of data currently spread across 2,800 data platforms, Chiou and Flaxington told me. Chiou highlights a subset of platforms as “the big six,” which include:
- ELICSAR, the Department of the Air Force’s cyber operations big data platform
- Vault, a data analytics platform
- Signus, which contains ISR data
- Blade, a platform for logistics data
- Unified Data Library, which contains use cases for Space Force
- Project Brown Heron, a data platform created to manage COVID-19 issues within the service
The data housed across these platforms currently exists in myriad formats.
Flaxington notes the “enterprise architecture will support C2 down to business units,” once completed.
The project sounds relevant to Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, but Chiou says this initiative is “not directly related;” although Flaxington says it “complements” the Joint Staff J6’s work on a JADC2 data architecture. The Advanced Battle Management System, or ABMS — which has been transitioned from the CAO’s office to acquisition — is the Air Force’s contribution to JADC2. ABMS is an “input” into the CAO’s current work on the department’s data architecture, but ultimately, this initiative is focused on data sharing internally.
“If data is the new oil,” Chiou said, “then we want to mine that data, refine that data,” to make it more useful across the service.
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