In a session at the Red Hat Summit (last week) a panel of defense contractors detailed some of what they have seen within U.S .defense agencies as they consider the move toward virtualization and the cloud.
John Barrette, Senior Acquisition Specialist at Odyssey Systems consulting group, said that in the USAF, what he has seen are ‘cloud pipes’. Barrette is also a former U.S Air Force officer. The concept of cloud pipes is were multiple groups within the military are moving to a cloud model but each one of them is moving in a different way. So the Army could be building one thing and the USAF is doing another pipe and none of them talk to each other.
“We’re trying to prevent that,” Barrette said. “One way to do that is with open source.”
The real key for continued open source virtualization and cloud technology adoption in the military, according to Barrette, will come from use-cases. So if one branch of military has had success, the story of that success should be shared.
Barrette also defended the open source model as being a secure one for Defense agencies. He argued that security through obscurity isn’t security. In contrast, the many eyes model of open source code can provide value from a security perspective.
“It is hard to hide a virus in a mature open source project,” Barret said.
Read the full story at Datamation:
Why US Defense Agencies are Moving to the Cloud
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
