Jane Edwards
Brian McMahon, director of cloud architecture at ManTech International, said the company secured a contract via the Defense Commercial Solutions Opening Pilot program after demonstrating its Secure Tactical Edge Platform in a denied, disrupted, intermittent and limited environment during a U.S. Navy demonstration in late 2020.
McMahon wrote in an article published Tuesday that ST3P functions as a hybrid cloud when connected and works as an on-premise cloud platform when disconnected.
“The benefit is that ST3P can bring cloud capabilities to on-premise or local environments – including at the tactical edge,” he said.
The company used its advanced cyber range environment or ACRE platform to develop a digital twin of the operating environment on the service’s M80 Stiletto prototype, a stealth ship designed to support combat operations in shallow, coastal waters, during the exercise conducted as part of the Navy’s ANTX experimentation.
McMahon said the company’s team used ST3P to link into the ship’s tracking and communications services to showcase how it could use the platform with the camera system to gather data and come up with an operational view of the system and to establish connection with commercial LTE signals to monitor the ship’s direction, speed and location.
“Because we had created a digital twin of the environment, we also created virtual, autonomous ‘humans’ with profiles and behavior patterns simulating threats or behaviors that presented risk. We could then model and rework the threat landscape and change resources or actions in order to mitigate risk,” he added.
McMahon said ST3P is “as a service” platform that comes with an open architecture environment that allows users to build, test and field applications using Agile methodologies and “provides data and analytics automation at the edge.”
