Ministry of Defence CIO Mike Stone looks to analytics to get competitive advantage for armed forces

MoD's public and private cloud-of-clouds IT transformation strategy will need analytics to achieve "competitive advantage", claims Stone

Ministry of Defence CIO Mike Stone is poised to roll out a series of new platforms and tools that, he claims, will transform the way in which IT and information is delivered to the military and the ministry that overseas the armed forces.

These include applications delivered in the cloud via a private instance of Microsoft Azure and an Office 365 rollout in that private cloud as well as, in the future, perhaps, applications and services delivered via the Amazon Web Services cloud, too.

Stone was speaking to Computing at Splunk's seventh user conference, .conf2016, in Orlando, Florida.

Such a radical re-architecting of military and MoD technology is required for two reasons, Stone told Computing. First, because historically, the MoD has been dependent on major monolithic IT services contracts that, in many respects, have diverged from ministry and military needs.

At the same time, though, people's expectations of corporate IT have completely changed, coloured by the ease of use with which applications and services can be used on both mobile devices and on the internet.

"Back in 2005 when the Defence Information Infrastructure (DII) contract was let, people had more, better IT at work than they did at home. Now it's completely the reverse - everybody has a lot more at home than at work. That's the same for most organisations," said Stone.

DII is a secure military network over which applications and services are delivered to the MoD, as well as the British Army, Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. Signed in 2005, DII was delivered and has been managed by a consortium of big-name services companies, including HPE Services, Fujitsu, Airbus Defence and Space, and CGI, the company that acquired Logica.

"The power of the cloud and mobility, social media, and, especially, platforms - particularly platform economics - is what I'm seeking to exploit. What I want to do is to ensure that we're providing to servicemen and civil servants the kinds of capabilities that are 'of the moment', if not better than what they can get at home," said Stone.

The new applications will be delivered as part of the MoDnet initiative, which Stone kicked off back in 2014, which is being supported by the ATLAS Consortium - the same collection of IT services companies that were behind the DII in 2005.

One of Stone's objectives is to create an ecosystem around the MoDnet platform - indeed, Stone describes it as defence-as-a-platform - which will both enable applications to be delivered more cost-effectively, as well as better applications more in line with users' expectations today in terms of ease-of-use and functionality.

And the ideas have also been presented to allies, including the US, Australia, New Zealand and other members of the Five Eyes partnership. "I'm working very closely with the Five Eyes community and the CIOs of those and increasingly we're working together and looking to create this ecosystem across different arenas," says Stone.

One of the key aspects of Stone's plans is analytics, where the MoD is trialling Splunk, alongside a number of other potential systems, with the idea that the data generated by the platform and the various applications it will be supporting can - and should - be subject to intensive analysis.

Both cloud and comprehensive analytics are essential to MoDnet and the future of IT in the armed forces, believes Stone, because they can enable a drastic expansion of IT enablement while at the same time providing much better value for money.

"In the past, I think it's fair to say that the forces of the high-spending nations really had the technological advantage. Today, with cloud and mobility, anybody can now get access, very cheaply, to high-tech capabilities," said Stone.

He concluded: "I'm seeking to fully exploit the power of the cloud. Essentially, we have a private instance of Azure and we're following a hybrid cloud strategy. We do have public cloud infrastructure as well, with both Azure and AWS, as well as Helion-G, the HPE cloud, so I've got a 'cloud of clouds' strategy... If we don't take advantage of cloud, others will."