Forces secure digital map access

The UK's armed forces have deployed a £1.5m high-security IT system to retrieve digital maps, surveys and technical documents wherever they are in the world.

By connecting to the geographic archive via satellite, the army, navy and air force will be able to access critical information needed for the planning of operations, terrain analysis and battle manoeuvres.

Built by the Defence Geographic Centre (DGC), the division of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) responsible for providing digital mapping, the system also transmits and backs ups video files and other essential geospatial data.

The centralised geographic digital storage system was designed and built by five software suppliers and received security clearance after testing last month.

'Now, more than ever, it is essential that digital maps, surveys and associated technical documents are instantly available to ground forces deployed on operations,' said an MoD spokesman.

Up to 132Tb of uncompressed data can be archived on the system, created by Sony Electronics, AMS, NCE, XenData and Qualstar.

'We needed integrated wide storage and archive capabilities for use by existing legacy systems, and new systems under development which would reduce management overheads,' said the MoD spokesman.

To ensure the data archive is highly secure and tamper-proof, the system includes Sony's S-AIT write-once-read-many application.

'The system uses encryption for data transfer, meets UK government approved authentication techniques and was subject to penetration testing,' said the spokesman.

The suppliers also worked with the DGC to ensure the system can survive possible attacks or physical disasters.

'The tape storage system has been configured to provide three-way replication that enables partially-written copies to be rotated off site, to ensure all data is always held at another secure off-site location,' said the MoD.

If the system is destroyed, it can automatically rebuild itself using backed-up data.