US Navy connects aircraft carrier to the cloud

The US Navy has conducted a pilot project to see if users at sea can connect to cloud services and the project has demonstrated that the Navy can consistently move several terabytes of data each day between the cloud and thousands of users.

Navy CIO Commander Kevin White during a live video demonstration from the Pacific Ocean said, “They’re using their NMCI (Navy/Marine Corps Intranet) phones to call home over voice over IP, or to call the beach to say, ‘Hey, I need this part rushed to the ship.’ We’re using it across all of our departments and embarked commands for quality-of-work type areas. Everything from our training department — ensuring that all of our readiness in our training cycle is up to date — to our medical department, to our supply department, they’re all reaching out over websites and services to ensure that we have continuity of operations, and ensure that this ship is ready to go when the time comes that we have to turn these services off.”

“While we’re out at sea right now, with this P-LEO capability, a cloud-connected node, and all the right elements in place, we’re able to scale new capabilities as they become available and rapidly deploy them while they’re monitored from the shore side,” added Commander White.