OPEN SOURCE BIG DATA
Tis creates more diversity and competi- tion. Te personal choice of your mobile phone platform is an excellent example where you might choose a device based on the variety of applications that can be built and used on it.
THE LOCK-IN PROBLEM One of the major challenges with the government procurement approach to acquiring technical solutions is “vendor lock-in.” Vendor lock-in occurs when a customer using a specific product or service cannot easily transition to a competitor. It is usually the result of proprietary technologies that are incom- patible with those of competitors.
Historically, large technical system contracts have been awarded for total solutions that create dependencies on a particular vendor or provider. Tese dependencies make a single contractor the sole provider for an extended time because the startup investment for a new solution is cost-prohibitive.
Consider weapon system software devel- oped
using commercial off-the-shelf
(COTS) products that are relevant to today’s standards and technology. If the initial award is given to a firm using a proprietary platform, the government may be forced to continue working with that firm for decades, even if the firm sells the technology or operates under a different company name. Tis type of lock-in is created because of government reliance on existing solutions and long development and procurement cycles for replacements.
Operating systems, databases and office productivity suites are other examples of capabilities that, once purchased, are nearly impossible to re-compete without massive organizational effects. Trough- out the enterprise, proprietary solutions
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can become the center of policy and workflow, making product changes dif- ficult and cost prohibitive. So, how can the Army reduce the risk of vendor lock- in when it comes to big data?
Te answer is simple: Partner with industry to develop standards for interoperability and place a premium on adaptive and iterated innovation control. Te Army should build a core, standards- based platform and encourage vendors to develop applications that are adaptable and responsive to new requirements on that platform.
Te cybersecurity domain offers an excel- lent test bed to explore this approach. Within the cyber domain, an enormous amount of data has to be collected and analyzed to find the most advanced threats. With this come significant requirements that cross technical and policy considerations. Te capability required by the cyber community comes from the service (an “analytic”) or ser- vices that sit on top of a platform.
With product differentiation, nearly every analytic vendor uses a proprietary platform when building an analytic. Tis creates a potential vendor lock-in trap. Tere is a legitimate fear that when com- mitting to a vendor-specific analytic, a proprietary platform will come along with it, excluding participation from other vendors. Lack of portability and interoperability of this type of solution lessens big data’s potential for the Army to store and share data in one place for use with different analytics from a wide variety of sources.
Because the level of effort to migrate data to a platform is so high, most likely there would not be available funding for investment in multiple platforms. To this end, over the past few years, PEO EIS
and ARCYBER have been experiment- ing with a big data cyber-analytics pilot.
Reviewing the technical requirements in the big data community uncovered something interesting: Nearly all ven- dor products are now based, largely, on high-quality open source distributions from the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, there are existing capabilities within DOD built for specific cyber use cases.
Te pilot leverages these two resources to build a no-cost licensed platform that enables multiple participants to pro- vide software. Te platform uses open standards where most big data vendors’ products can easily be adapted. More importantly, the cyber community can develop its own small-scale capabili- ties without any additional contracting actions. Tis enables a competitive envi- ronment whereby vendors of all sizes can participate and the government has low risk of vendor lock-in.
CONTROLLING COSTS Te undersecretary of defense for acquisi- tion, technology and logistics directed 22 years ago that all DOD components and agencies use open systems specifications and standards for acquisition of weapon systems implemented through what is called open systems architecture (OSA). OSA is a key tenet of Better Buying Power (BBP) 3.0 for promoting competi- tion. OSA principles are also supportive of and consistent with the use of open source software (OSS), which is consid- ered commercial computer software, in systems.
Te big data cyber analytics pilot looks to OSS as a way to encourage indus- try partnerships. It also seeks to obtain maximum use of limited resources while avoiding vendor lock-in and licensing
Army AL&T Magazine July-September 2016
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