As the U.S. Navy works to modernize, a cohesive technology ecosystem can help increase efficiency across all environments and recruit and retain talent.
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A unified digital ecosystem brings ease of use to sophisticated AI
at the edge
A technological Swiss Army knife
Retain talent with familiar solutions
A unified platform supports all environments
While keeping pace with innovation is an essential goal for the public sector as a whole, it’s especially critical for the Department of Defense (DoD) as it works tirelessly to secure the nation by land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. At the same time, modernization comes with additional hurdles for DoD organizations that are often operating from remote edge locations.
Consider the U.S. Navy, for example. Modernization comprises updating individual applications and software all the way up to modifying and building massive new ships and equipping them with advanced capabilities. So many elements that make up the Navy’s technology infrastructure are both complex and mission-critical, which makes retiring legacy systems difficult — any outages or downtime pose significant risks.
As the Navy looks to create more agile environments and securely increase the pace of modernization, technological solutions such as Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) can help support the deployment of cutting-edge technologies at the edge as part of a complete end-to-end technology ecosystem.
GDC is a portfolio of hardware and software solutions that brings Google Cloud into data centers or other locations of your choice. It is designed for customers with sovereignty, regulatory compliance, and low-latency requirements. GDC air-gapped is authorized to host Top Secret and Secret missions for the U.S. Intelligence Community, and Top Secret missions for the DoD.
A technological Swiss Army knife
For the Navy, GDC can serve as an “easy button,” explained Brett Miller, customer engineer of public sector at Google Cloud. “When you make it easier for the Navy to manage infrastructure, they're going to be able to keep up with it more,” he said. “They're going to need fewer people to manage it, they're going to need less expertise to manage it. It means lower costs and increased velocity — that's crucially important for the Navy to keep up with our adversaries.”
Traditionally, managing technology on a ship, for example, involves many disparate tools and solutions and can require a range of different specialists — from virtual machines, to networking, to storage experts — as each part of the ship’s technology infrastructure presents unique complexities. A single technologist will not often have sufficient expertise to manage all areas. Instead, multiple experts must work together to integrate each element of the technology infrastructure.
GDC, however, unifies these capabilities in a “plug-and-play” package, according to Miller. And like a sort of technological Swiss Army knife, GDC can be scaled across a variety of environments — from large data centers to a portable GDC air-gapped appliance — all operated via a consistent interface.
“GDC, the way that it's packaged, and the way it was built, enables our military to provide these high-end capabilities that are universally symmetric across all environments around the world,” Miller said, whether on a submarine, on a ship, or in the Pentagon.
Retain talent with familiar solutions
Beyond the consistent user experience across Navy environments, much of the Google ecosystem has the added benefit of being heavily used in educational and personal settings. That familiarity can be leveraged to help mitigate the recruitment and retainment challenges that extend across the government. Rather than having to learn to use legacy technology and tools only relevant to the government, new recruits joining the Navy will be able to use industry-leading solutions in their work environment, whether that be on base, on a ship or in a submarine.
“Familiarity and comfort with technology is important,” Miller said. As people may shift between working for the government, to industry and back again, “they don't want to have to retrain on a thousand different things as they move through their careers.”
The Google ecosystem creates consistency from the internet to air-gapped environments, supporting classified and unclassified missions — a universal interface that results in the democratization of technology. Cutting-edge technologies lose value when they become overly complicated to use, especially when users, like those in the Navy, are dealing with stressful, unpredictable environments.
“We always want to talk about how awesome technology is,” Miller said. “But it's not enough to make cool technology. You have to be able to train people to use that technology efficiently and at scale.”
As emerging technologies mature and their capabilities grow more advanced, it’s essential that those advancements still keep people — the end users — at the forefront.
“As engineers and as people in technology, we want to concentrate on the bolts and the screws and all because that's really exciting,” Miller said. “It’s so important that as technology gets more complicated, the interfaces get simpler, because we want more people to use it.”
A unified platform supports all environments
A cohesive system also helps establish a Joint Operational Edge and supports defense initiatives like Combined Joint All Domain and Control (CJADC2) by creating connections across tactical, operational, and strategic environments.
Learn more about how GDC and the full Google ecosystem can streamline innovation.
This helps the Navy streamline workflows, such as efficiently managing data sets on the battlefield that can also be pushed back to a centralized GDC setup for high-end processing or to train AI models. A technology ecosystem that’s both powerful and easy to use enables greater agility, faster innovation and a more connected digital defense landscape.
“To have it all work together as a unified system will help the Navy move forward,” Miller said. “I think it’s going to be very powerful
for the mission.”
DVIDS | Jhon Parsons