NGA sets up geospatial intell portal on Amazon cloud
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The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Lockheed Martin and Esri, have set up a geospatial intelligence portal on the AWS Commercial Cloud Services environment.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Lockheed Martin and Esri have deployed software to the Amazon Web Services Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) environment, a move that will help agencies more freely share and analyze geospatial intelligence worldwide.
The move creates a portal for Ersi’s ArcGIS geographic information system that will provide a single, secure environment via the cloud for analysts throughout the intelligence community to organize and share geospatial data.
ArcGIS offers a range of tools and applications that let users link to geographic information data to assemble and share maps.
The companies involved called the development a “foundational step in consolidating multiple geospatial intelligence portals into the single NGA-provided portal, resulting in technology and license cost savings.”
“This cloud implementation also further shapes the government’s processes for architecting and implementing enterprise-class services within a cloud environment,” said Jason O’Connor, vice president of analysis and mission solutions for Lockheed.
Esri president Jack Dangermond said the move underscores the importance of “consolidating geospatial intelligence information via a single portal to facilitate rapid situational awareness and response by our intelligence community.”
The move to set up a GIS portal on the cloud comes on the heels of the NGA’s move last fall to work with Lockheed to move its Map of the World to the Amazon C2S environment.
The Map of the World is an interface for geospatial intelligence data, designed to explore continuously updated content and link geospatial features to intelligence observations, according to NGA.
Lockheed Martin and Esri have also partnered for the last eight years on the Geospatial-Intelligence Visualization Services (GVS) program, which helped NGA and the intelligence community accomplish the cloud migration.
The Total Application Services for Enterprise Requirements GVS contract vehicle, originally awarded in 2012, offers geospatial visualization context and analytic capabilities to intelligence officers and policy makers through classified and unclassified networks.