Pentagon Looks to Militarize the Cloud

February 22, 2011 By Spencer Ackerman DANGER ROOM

Store tactical military data on distributed servers, accessible through networked computers or mobile devices? Ask most officers about cloud computing and they’ll look at you patronizingly and say: Yes, Google Docs is nice, but it’s not secure enough for our secrets. (I write from experience.) But Darpa’s new budget shows that it wants the military all the way up into the cloud, and plans to set up mobile wireless hotspots so troops can reach the cloud from the most connectivity-forsaken places. Appropriately, the goal of getting big data files to troops on the move in the middle of nowhere is, well, distributed between two new programs from the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers. Cloud to the Edge looks to essentially ape Google’s tools (other than search) to create a military cloud. And Mobile Hot Spots wants to carry connectivity anywhere troops need to share those big data files.