January 30, 2024
We are recording this interview at Monk’s BBQ in lovely downtown Purcellville, VA.
When people think of Amazon Web Services, they normally think of a data center. This was certainly top of mind when AWS hosted 10,000 at its Public Sector Summit in 2023.
Today, we go in a different direction. Dave Rubal is a well-known innovator in the Washington DC technical community. He has decided to throw his hat into the ring with something called the Secure Tactical Edge.
It makes sense. If you look at how storage and computing are changing. In a recent study, IDC predicts that in the future 75% of data will be collected at the “edge.”
The federal government has a myriad of ways to manage this “edge” concept. Civilian agencies may have one approach, and the DoD has another. In addition to being on the edge, they need to be able to deploy this concept in a tactical as well as secure method.
During today’s interview, Dave Rubal sketches out one aspect of that movement to the edge. He talks about how the DoD can securely use edge cases. In other words, the Secure Tactical Edge.
"So the edge as it's defined, as we were talking about here, has a lot of possibilities. Ground based systems, mobile systems, some partially mobile, some partially fixed, but space space systems offer new opportunities in terms of increasing information, increasing intelligence, and then being able to leverage that "
Let us take a small task as an example, storage of video feeds. The DoD has facilities all over the world and needs physical security. It would be ridiculous to store these feeds in a data center across the globe. Further, there are retention policies that are in place to reduce the burden of storage.
Another example may be unstructured data being collected all over the earth, and even above. Agencies must be able to architect a solution that takes advantage of innovation on the edge to reduce cost, improve flexibility, and provide data rapidly so warfighters can make decisions quickly.
Here is a hashtag summary:
#TacticalEdge #OperationalEdge #HybridCloud #EdgeComputing
This is the episode that introduces the tried and true, “Up close and personal” Dave’s avocation is to volunteer at his local fire station. He is a licensed EMT and has saved lives with his skills.
If you enjoyed this episode, then you may want to listen to
EP-130: Reducing Risk in the Hybrid Cloud Through Identification
Why: This complements EP-126 by focusing on identity as a security measure in hybrid environments—great follow-up for risk-conscious readers.EP-128: Understand Risks in the Hybrid Cloud
Why: Deepens the reader’s understanding of cloud-specific vulnerabilities, reinforcing the security theme
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