Lorraine Bassett, principal technical business development leader for internet of things at Amazon Web Services’ worldwide public sector, said ruggedized, portable edge devices designed to work in austere and remote environments could help government agencies and the military collect data and generate insights for faster decision-making.
“Edge computing is particularly beneficial in two situations: when a great deal of data needs to be migrated to the cloud for storage but there is little or no bandwidth and when data needs to be collected and acted on quickly at the edge (e.g., autonomous vehicles and drones),” Bassett wrote.
She said AWS developed a family of Snow edge devices designed to work in “nontraditional, disconnected or intermittently connected environments” and do not require any data center space.
These rugged, purpose-built edge devices include AWS Snowcone, AWS Snowball Edge Storage Optimized and Snowball Edge Compute Optimized devices.
“Agencies can execute compute applications at the edge and ship the device to AWS for offline data transfer, or they can transfer data from edge locations using AWS DataSync,” Bassett added.
She also discussed how the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency automates imagery analysis and generates insights at the tactical edge to support intelligence and military leaders using edge devices, including AWS Snowball Edge and AWS IoT Greengrass.
