From John W. Miller, the Wall Street Journal:  NATO, whose headquarters are located near the Brussels airport, is touting its own entry into cloud computing. A new software system built by IBM Corp. over the past year is being rolled out at Allied Command Transformation, based in Norfolk, Va. Initially, it will be used as a closed system for a few dozen people on site. To help secure data secrecy, the network will have no connection to the Internet.

The challenge of building the cloud was to integrate NATO’s complex arsenal of data sources. “If you’re at NATO HQ, you have all these feeds coming in,” says E.J. Herold, the IBM director responsible for the project. “A drone sending in full-motion video, a radar on an aircraft, human sensors on patrol.”

The goal, in the end, is to make NATO “a leaner and more agile organization,” said Johan Goossens, a technology manager at the Norfolk center. If the project proves to work as hoped, it will be rolled out across the alliance’s 28 nations, including at NATO headquarters in Brussels.  (graphic: etherfleet.com)

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