Jane Edwards
Companies that offer satellite imagery and data to government agency customers are now providing data analysis support to help clients quickly generate insights from large volumes of data amid the growth of satellite constellations and emergence of new sensors, Defense One reported Thursday.
Maxar Intelligence CEO Dan Smoot talked about the “push, pull” model, in which the company works to meet the government’s urgent satellite data requirements in key areas while offering analysis support in a proactive manner for emerging situations in a specific area.
“They can come to us and sit there and say, ‘We’re interested in INDOPACOM, a very specific [area]. What’s happened over the last couple days and what’s happening right now?” Smoot said of the pull approach.
According to the chief executive, the push aspect of the model is a newer approach in which the space imagery provider pushes intelligence to a government client if there is an emerging event in a particular area that needs attention.
“If there’s a change on the ground, how do you actually give that analyst the information quickly, so they can actually disseminate what the change is, versus trying to parse through all information to find the change? And the way that we’re approaching it, the way that our insights are gonna work is, we’re gonna actually be able to push that change so that they’ll [meaning the government customer] understands the information that they’re looking for, and be able to subscribe to something,” Smoot noted.
To meet the increasing computing requirements for space data, Amazon Web Services is establishing more connection points, including edge-based connections in support of U.S. and allied militaries.
“We think about what are the optionality of connection points, and how frequently does your edge talk back to the bigger cloud? And how much processing can you do there versus how much processing do you need to do back in the cloud?” said Liz Martin, director of Department of Defense business at AWS.
