Objectivity 'clouds' counter-terrorism

At the 5^th International Cloud Computing Conference and Expo held in New York City on April 19-21, GSN: Government Security News caught up with Thomas Krafft, director of marketing at Objectivity, Inc. of Sunnyvale, CA, who spoke exclusively to the magazine about the role of cloud computing in the 21^st Century.

“The government is currently in the process of digitally compiling the pedigree and lineage of information for counter terrorism measures,” said Krafft. “With this kind of system we could have caught the Christmas Day underwear bomber before he got on the plane.”

Krafft sympathized with the need to optimize information sharing: “Bureaucracy moves slowly and it is difficult getting data to exchange with other systems and today there is so much capability for collecting so much data and we do what other relational databases can’t do.”

The primary focus of Objectivity, Inc is providing advanced relationship analytics in which complex, multi-dimensional correlations of numerous degrees between them, can be determined in a matter of seconds. 

“Cloud computing offers an alternative to buying costly hardware or even having an IT department. Cloud computing is a distributive application that processes more data and more complex data more quickly, providing more efficient and more scalable data management solutions just by the very nature of distribution.”

But cloud computing is not just the current “hot topic” for computer connoisseurs and IT professionals. It has actual real world applicability, especially when it comes to homeland security issues.

“With the evolution of technology, the government can collect massive amounts of data, Krafft told GSN.

“But humans are still reading this data, and an analyst can only see a snapshot and can only interpret it as a human does. Objectivity’s cloud computing platform can accumulate more data, we can catch more data without throwing any of it away. Cloud computing can discover the most important details in the depth of this data, allowing users to make better decisions with it. 

“So far, the government has only been capable of connecting data by a few degrees. We can do six-degrees -- kind of like Kevin Bacon -- or better in just seconds. We can tell you where the bad guy is, right now, in real-time or where he was five minutes ago which, is much better then knowing where he was two days ago.

“I like to think,” Krafft said, “We’re out there catching bad guys with our technology.”

But even the government, for whom this technology is well suited, has it skeptics.  Alec Ross, who serves as the senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called cloud computing, “a double-edged sword.”

“If [it] lives in the cloud, who owns that information?” he asked during an interview set to air April 24 on C-SPAN.

Learn more about Objectivity; watch the video interview with GSN: Government Security News here.