Russia’s war on Ukraine has yielded troves of battlefield data, but Kyiv has no efficient way to share it with NATO friends. The alliance aims to fix that in the new year.
“Ukraine has a lot of data that they want to give to NATO” as part of a joint training center in Poland, said Tom Goffus, the alliance’s assistant secretary general for operations, during a Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance virtual event on Monday. “We’re doing a cloud solution for that…to be able to handle large amounts of data from the Ukraine battlefield. And we’re hoping that it’s going to be operational on NATO cloud in January of 2026.”
The final hurdle involves process, not technology.
“They’ve got all the equipment to do it,” Goffus said. “What we don’t have…is we don’t yet have a policy on how to accredit it. How can you accredit this system in order to use it in a safe manner? All of our tools are designed for network-centric security, and we want to go to cloud-centric security, and so that’s one of our biggest challenges.”
The plan is to learn from big cloud service providers in the U.S. that operate classified clouds for national security. The Pentagon has also been working on improving secure communications with allies and partners.
“I’m going to be talking to some of the hyperscalers who have done this already in the U.S. system. There are secure clouds out there, nationally, at the secret and even higher level. So this is figuring out an accreditation process to go along with the capability and essentially get the culture, the process and the policy to catch up with what’s available out there.”
Goffus said the goal is to build everything from scratch to avoid inheriting the “limitations” of existing networks. Also, while the aim is to use commercially available systems with open architecture—that is, they can interface with products regardless of what company made them—the government has to be the owner, ultimately.
“It has to be brand-new. It is not system-of-systems. It’s not a federated system of systems—many of our federated system-of-systems are actually proprietary, which makes it harder for things to talk to each other,” he said. “But I do want to stress that this has to, in the end, be government defined and government owned, though it is commercial solutions. And we need to be the gatekeepers on that.”
The proliferation of data generated and used on the modern battlefield from fighter jets to drones to ships has increased the need for militaries to be able to access, analyze and transfer information quickly (even for medical responses).
And for NATO, the vision is to integrate the data from partner nations and provide that central cloud-based solution, Goffus said.
“I think NATO needs to have a cloud solution, [an] open architecture way of integrating things that the nations buy. The nations buy the sensors. They buy that sensor suite, sensor system that feeds the data. But NATO does the data integration and makes it all good,” he said. “The strategy overall right now would be more in that line, and that common funding would go to help make sure that we have that data backbone, that common data layer that everybody can pull from.”
