IBM Helps NATO To Reach For The Cloud

IBM is embarking on a large international project with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The company will show NATO how to migrate its wildly disparate computer systems to cloud computing.

The IBM-powered initiative will enable the 61-year-old organisation to plan, build and demonstrate a new cloud computing model. This would allow the organisation to consolidate and integrate its IT capabilities and deploy them for critical command-and-control programmes.

For its part, IBM will develop a cloud computing system that will share a common operating environment across many mission processes. By aggregating and sharing disparate computing resources, from networks to servers to storage, the cloud computing model will help NATO to deploy IT capabilities more broadly, quickly and cost-effectively.

The ACT group is charged with arranging

The ACT group is charged with arranging and deploying future projects for NATO. Its IT section is headed up by Johan Goossens, director of  the Innovation & Human Factors Branch.

His group’s mission, as Goossens sees it, is this: “Can we, in this federated world which is chaotic sometimes, however capitalise on cloud computing to: a) save money and reduce costs, and b) improve interoperability, so that the data sets can be connected better than they are today?” he asked.

The personnel ratio in NATO

“If you look at the personnel ratio in NATO, very often you see nearly a 1:1 ratio between a support person and the number of servers we have. Whereas the industrial rates are completely different,” Goossens said. ”So there’s a financial argument as to why we wanted to look at cloud computing.”

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