NATO ACT 'Art of the Possible' Interoperability Demonstration

GovCloud Network is proud to have served as the Program Manager for the NATO Allied Command Transformation, "Art of the Possible" Interoperability Demonstration on December 16, 2016. supporting the The Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC), this effort featured an important demonstration for military, government and business leaders by its member-companies to underscore the benefits of collaborating via an interoperable network environment. The demonstration used a secure, federated-cloud infrastructure to highlight the consortium's work over the past few years in how to develop a trusted environment, including governance processes and federation management as well as interoperability verification.

This demonstration itself is an outgrowth of  the NCOIC Interoperability Verification (IV) process, NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCI Agency). It's intended for use by NATO in the acquisition of technical products and services for Federated Mission Networking (FMN), a concept to support secure collaboration and information exchange in multi-national operations. The IV assessment, based on product testing that takes place as part of the normal quality manufacturing process, looks at how well the technology meets NATO requirements and can be implemented and used by the NATO enterprise, NATO nations and NATO partners. The vision is for NATO and its partners to get enhanced capability for the same cost and for vendors to have access to more markets.

The NCOIC is an international not-for-profit organization with more than 50 members and advisors in 12 countries who represent businesses, government agencies and organizations that are focused on advancing global, cross-domain interoperability. The consortium has a 11-year history of developing world-class technical resources that promote the use of effective network-centric systems and interoperability in both the public and private sectors

The NCOIC technical team showed the critical prep work - the implementation process NCOIC has developed for creating an interoperable IT environment that can mean mission success for multi-agency groups or organizations with complex needs. At the conclusion of the demo, senior leaders discussed their thoughts on various interoperability issues.

The project also included a demonstration of  the Burstorm Platform, a computer aided design tool developed specifically for the design of cloud computing solutions. GovCloud Network leverages this capability to:

• Visually model of compute, storage, network and datacenter infrastructure;
• Research service provided catalogs that currently contains hundreds of vendors and over 40,000 products;
• Benchmark cloud computing solutions through the use of accurate price, performance and price-performance data;
• Summarize the current IT state of clients;
• Model and design application to build based on location, performance, price and security; and
• Conduct real-time collaboration with colleagues, customers and IT teams across the globe

The successful demonstration resulted in an ACT request for additional support and a follow-up demonstration tentatively scheduled for March 15, 2017.  GovCloud Network looks forward to supporting that project as well

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