Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Esri deployed commercial software, a portal for ArcGIS, to the Amazon Web Services Commercial Cloud Services (CS2) environment with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Lockheed Martin said on Tuesday.
The release of the portal for Esri’s ArcGIS geographic information system (GIS) is the first time the companies have deployed software to a cloud service for an intelligence community customer. This provides a unified environment for analysts to securely organize and share geospatial intelligence data throughout the intelligence community and Department of Defense.
ArcGIS connects users to maps and geographical information, Lockheed Martin said. Users can create and view maps, compile geographic data, analyze mapped information, and share geographic informational in several applications.
This is a foundational step in consolidating multiple geospatial intelligence portals into the single NGA-provided portal, Lockheed Martin said. This has resulted in technology and license cost savings.
“Working with Lockheed Martin and the NGA on this strategic implementation for national security is particularly meaningful. It recognizes the importance of consolidating geospatial intelligence information into a single portal to facilitate rapid situational awareness and response by our intelligence community,” Jack Dangermond, president of Esri, said in a statement.
“Deploying Esri’s Portal for ArcGIS to a commercial cloud environment securely organizes existing data and facilitates collaboration across intelligence agencies. This cloud implementation also further shapes the government’s processes for architecting and implementing enterprise class services within a cloud environment,” Jason O’Connor, vice president of Analysis and Mission Solutions for Lockheed Martin, added in a press release.
This is NGA’s second major cloud move, after the agency moved the Map of the World application to the C2S environment last year.
Lockheed Martin and Esri have partnered for eight years on the Geospatial-Intelligence Visualization Services (GVS) program. This helped NGA and the Intelligence Community reach this cloud migration step, Lockheed Martin said.
The Total Application Services for Enterprise Requirements (TASER) GVS contract vehicle, first awarded in 2012, conveys geospatial visualization context and analytic capabilities to warfighters, intelligence officers, and policy-makers through classified and unclassified computer networks.