Making satellite imagery actionable for warfighters

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Military success depends in part on surveillance and reconnaissance, and today much of that work revolves around satellite imagery. Having timely, accurate intelligence improves situational awareness, mission planning, and damage assessment, to name a few key elements of warfighting missions. In support of combat units, geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) systems manage complex processes around satellite imagery, from collection to processing to dissemination. Gathering insights from these images in real time requires reliable, scalable, secure, high-performance infrastructure. Even a small outage or performance loss can have a major impact on downstream operations. By helping ensure reliable, secure access to satellite-imagery assets, Oracle Cloud turns them into actionable intelligence—an important advantage in any warfighting scenario.

Ready for GEOINT

Oracle Cloud is the first public cloud built from the ground up to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprise processing and security requirements. Oracle Cloud is designed with security, performance, and interoperability as key tenets. With a full range of infrastructure, platform, and applications, Oracle Cloud has the power to handle large-scale GEOINT applications, thanks to fast spatial index and query performance, plus support for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. Complex image and data processing work streams run faster with built-in capabilities, such as real-time cataloging and integration of location-based geometries, telemetries, and spatial data. And Oracle Exadata Cloud supports the high-throughput transactions of imagery ordering and supply chain operations. Oracle Cloud can also make image analysis faster and more accurate. Thanks to spatial and graph analytic operations built into Oracle Autonomous Database that support interactive map visualization, analysts can quickly discover relationships and detect changes. Embedded graph models highlight relationships, while other algorithms let analysts use pattern recognition, classification, statistical analysis, and machine learning for imagery analysis and reporting. The result: efficient analysis of massive amounts of visual data. High performance computing (HPC) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers a powerful computational architecture to advance the throughput of image-processing applications. High performance computing on OCI delivers high-performance processors, fast and dense local storage, high-throughput and ultra-low latency RDMA cluster networks, and the tools to automate and run jobs seamlessly. GPU-powered bare metal and virtual instances let military analysts run image-processing applications that use machine learning and AI. Not only does it rival the performance of on-premises systems, high performance computing on OCI provides the elasticity and consumption-based pricing of the cloud along with the ability to scale as needed to tens of thousands of cores simultaneously.

Powerful developer tools

Cloud developers creating new tools for image analysis benefit from Oracle’s commitment to open standards and open architecture. Developers can use their preferred environments (SQL, PL/SQL, Java, Python, JavaScript, JavaScript Extension Toolkit, Node.js, JSON, or REST) to enrich data and develop apps using Oracle Cloud without having to learn new languages. With Oracle Machine Learning and AI, it’s easy to build, train, and deploy models with favorite open source frameworks, such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, or benefit from the speed of in-database machine learning. Oracle Cloud lets analysts enhance data with spatial attributes and unlock hidden location components in less structured data. It also analyzes moving objects for pairwise interactions and delivers prebuilt anomaly detection, natural language processing, computer vision, and other AI services.

Investing in United States government missions

Oracle’s commitment to the US government spans more than 40 years. With the shift to cloud, that focus has not wavered. Oracle has and continues to invest heavily to bring commercial innovation and parity to US government missions. Our EverythingEverywhere commitment means government agencies can access the same services with consistent service level agreements (SLAs) in cloud regions that span all data security classifications, including Special Access Programs. Combined with a business model that favors price-performance advantage and low egress fees, Oracle offers compelling value for government agencies. Oracle also offers dedicated regions to support all US government classification environments from headquarters to the mission edge. Unclassified workloads run in regions authorized through FedRAMP High and DISA Impact Level 5. Classified workloads are supported in a growing number of dedicated regions built to Department of Defense (DoD) and Intelligence Community standards. With more than 30 global regions and hundreds of services as of 2021, Oracle Cloud continues to rapidly expand. And for the most demanding workloads, such as GEOINT and satellite image analysis, Oracle Cloud enables the DoD and other organizations to harness the power of high-performance computing without the upfront investment and complex maintenance of the past.

About Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud is the first public cloud built from the ground up to meet the needs of the most demanding enterprise processing and security requirements. Oracle Cloud is designed with security, performance, and interoperability as key tenets. With a full range of infrastructure, platform, and applications, Oracle Cloud delivers higher performance, lower cost, and easier migration.

This content is made possible by our sponsor Oracle; it is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of GovExec's editorial staff.

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