For warfighters and military commanders to be able to use data to support decision making, they need to be able to access and connect to the cloud wherever and whenever the mission demands.
But at the tactical edge, warfighters often find themselves in disconnected or low connectivity environments, making cloud access difficult or impossible. Executive Mosaic spoke with Liz Martin, director of the Department of Defense business at Amazon Web Services, in a new video interview to find out how the company is supporting edge operations.
“Accessing, processing and sharing data at the tactical edge has become increasingly essential to enabling mission-wide decision making, whether the mission is a large-scale military operation, crisis response or coordinating the transportation of critical supplies and troops,” Martin told Executive Mosaic’s video reporter, Summer Myatt.
“Today, the DOD relies on many military applications that are data heavy and depend on low latency to support critical communications and coordination in the field. However, accessing the cloud capabilities needed to support these applications and large-scale data demands in remote environments can be really a challenge,” she added.
In response to these needs, AWS launched a new tactical edge service called the modular data center, which was designed to get storage and compute capabilities to the edge and help warfighters manage large workloads in disconnected, disrupted, intermittent or limited environments.
“This is a cost effective, self-contained modular data center solution,” Martin explained. “It’s essentially the size of two shipping containers and comes preconfigured with data center infrastructure, including networking, cooling and power distribution equipment.”
The new AWS offering is only available to U.S. government customers under the DOD’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability Contract, which the company won one of four spots on in December 2022.
This video is part of Executive Mosaic’s interview series featuring all four JWCC winners. Check out what Google, Microsoft and Oracle added to the conversation, and subscribe to Executive Mosaic’s YouTube channel to stay up-to-date with the latest insights from GovCon’s leaders.
