14 Jul 15. The Intelligence Community wins with DI2E plugfests. For more years than its members like to remember, the geospatial community has been trying to figure out a way to bring emerging capabilities to the U.S. government customer base. Traditional cartography, imagery collection and imagery analysis is a tradecraft well known within the Intelligence Community (IC), but the common challenge of simply placing data over a map or image in a standardized fashion has yet to be solved.
The problems have been twofold: (1) there has been some doubt about the existence of a common path at all because standardization has eluded the IC and, for that matter, the entire whole of government; so (2) the geospatial community has in many cases given up, choosing to spend its research and development capital on commercial providers who are eager to find solutions that feed a new, fast-growing and profitable way of doing business.
Enter the Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise (DI2E), built on an understanding that the old way of doing business – federal dollars to spawn GEOINT ideas – is history, because those dollars are harder to come by. A reason for creating DI2E is finding solutions that can be used over and over again, often in different combinations with other technologies — to facilitate standards that define layers of interoperability among Web services. In those solutions, the geospatial community is taking a step back into the future.
By participating in the annual DI2E Plugfest eXchanges, geospatial companies can leverage technology created for commercial customers, turning that technology into off-the-shelf, proven solutions to cope with working across a 17-member IC that has gone about its business in 17 different ways. Moreover, they can identify ground that has already been tread and look at complementing other technologies to result in a modular end product that is greater than the sum of its parts.
To succeed in Plugfest, a company has to have a good product, prepare to demonstrate ways to use it and understand that no company is an island in solving intelligence problems. We all need to find ways to mesh our products’ attributes to meet a DI2E axiom: Talent must be blended in ways to fill gaps within the intelligence information enterprise.
It’s like building a winning baseball club: my starting pitching, plus your hitting, plus somebody else’s fielding and somebody else’s bullpen can yield success. You can’t do it with starting pitching alone. And hitting without pitching isn’t going to win a World Series. (Source: Defense Systems)
14 Jul 15. EDA cyber ranges project gets approval. The European Defence Agency’s (EDA) military requirements for cyber defence testing ranges have been officially endorsed, the agency announced on 13 July. This marks the beginning of the EDA’s cyber ranges project. The scope of the project is to improve the use of future and existing cyber ranges to conduct cyber defence testing, training and exercises for national and European Union (EU) personnel. It will be carried out within the context of the EU Cyber Security Strategy recognising cyber defence as one of its strategic priorities. The EDA made its initial proposal for cooperative cyber defence testing, training and exercises under the pooling and sharing agenda in 2012. Cyber range interoperability aims to improve cooperation among operational cyber defence organisations, processes and systems. The EDA cyber ranges project will take place under the EU pooling and sharing agenda and aims to increase the availability, occupation rate and efficiency of current cyber range facilities.
The newly approved military requirements define an EDA ad hoc cyber ranges project that will take place in a spiral approach until it reaches full operational capability in 2018. The working group will reach an agreement on complete project arrangements by late 2015 and begin the implementation and realisation phase by early 2016. (Source: She