Digital Media Buzz > Cloud Computing Improves Intelligence Gathering

Cloud Computing Improves Intelligence Gathering

By Barbara Gengler

With local, state and federal governments transitioning into cloud computing territory, there is more opportunity to streamline the process of information gathering.

Two companies have teamed up to illustrate how this process works.

Appistry and Tygart Technology recently held a webinar to discuss implementing Appistry’s CloudIQ platform in Tygart’s MX Server product. MX Server is a server-based solution that processes vast amounts of video and photo collections quickly and uses face recognition technology.

Tygart built its MX Server application software on Appistry’s CloudIQ platform, which delivers transparent scalability, application portability and automates management to new and existing applications.

Sam Charrington, Appistry vice president, product management and marketing, hosted the event that drew attention to advanced IT-digital media, analytics and biometrics technologies.

Tygart has been in business 17 years supporting the US intelligence community, the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, law enforcement and other governmental agencies.

John Kostak, Tygart senior marketing manager says the future of software engineering is here today and “if you’re planning to be a player two to five years out in this market, with this technology, you really need to get your feet wet.”

Kostak also says there’s been an explosive growth in the production of digital content. “Federal organizations we work with and intelligence communities have a real critical need now to process huge amounts of videos of photographs to track and identify and authenticate people depicted in this digital media,” he says. “The only way to scale that to the masses is to use a cloud computing model.”

Kostak also says the future of cloud computing with Tygart is really the tapestry that drives the company’s roadmap from agencies that are going to be deploying private clouds to inter-agency digital media management as some of the repositories become non-classified.

“Cloud computing has a huge future with Tygart and we’re looking forward to continuing the ride and the race,” Kostak says. “We have some customers that have as many as 200,000 transactions a day and they are accumulating 10, 15, 20 or 30 terabytes of digital media per month.”

Kostak’s colleague Jeremy Queen, Tygart senior cloud software engineer, says Matchbox, which provides a lot of biometric function fingerprints, facial recognition and voice recognition capabilities, has been gaining a lot of traction. “We started doing research into how we could utilize commodity hardware to get as much video processing and biometric matching performance as possible,” Queen says.

Queen says Tygart took the company’s Matchbox core engine and created a more server-oriented version. The next step involved scaling that out. “We took an original prototype that was based on one server and took that and within a few hours, honestly, we adjusted that into the CloudIQ platform,” he says. “We were getting pretty much linear scalability right away. And it was very impressive.”

Additional benefits include increased cloud computing power, integrated open platforms and broadening the scope of repository ingest to help improve mission success rates.

Even so, a new joint study, by Proofpoint and Osterman Research, revealed the term cloud computing brings a variety of definitions and perceptions that may stall enterprise adoption of cloud computing technologies.

Nearly 40 percent say yes to the question, “when I hear the term cloud computing I am generally confused given the many definitions” while 52 percent answered no.

Gary Steele, Proofpoint chief executive, says that any great paradigm shift, cloud computing included, will always be accompanied by hype and a far amount of confusion.

“So we’re not surprised to see those percentages, even among the power users, the IT professionals,” he says. “There’s still a significant amount of ‘fear, uncertainty and doubt’ surrounding data security and financial payback issues.”