Keywords

Abstract

As the simulation industry has grown over the decades to several hundred sites, many different contractors have chosen different paths for design, development, and deployment. This has resulted in unique security requirements, tools, personnel, policies, and contract vehicles that make the entire enterprise, across all training platforms, difficult and expensive to manage and keep secure, particularly considering the ongoing evolution of security threats. Most of the system designs are platform specific, tightly coupled architectures and solutions that are difficult to reuse, and often have limited interoperability with other simulations, resulting in “Fair Fight” challenges due to different Synthetic Environments and databases. Multiple classification levels also contribute to interoperability challenges. 

As the simulation industry largely continues to use discrete computers and devices to implement training systems, computational resources are often over-specified as a risk reduction measure resulting in unused resources. Cloud technology provides the advantage of being dynamically configurable and scalable depending on the load and enhances commonality, sustainability, and resilience while minimizing hardware obsolescence issues. 

Our Industry have recognized that digital transformation, enabled by cloud technology and supported by modular open systems approach (MOSA) and model-based systems engineering, provides the right path forward for the future. 

This tutorial presents a potential path forward, via a Cyber-Secure Hybrid Cloud (CSHC). We intend to show how CSHC enables solutions to these challenges and provides more benefits to the simulation domain and show successful implementation and methodology use cases under the Air Force Simulator Common Architecture Requirements and Standards (SCARS) initiative at the end of the presentation. 

The presentation is structured in five parts to achieve its core learning objectives: 

First, we will provide an overview of the problems facing the industry.  

Next, we continue with understanding Cloud Technology to provide a basic understanding of what Cloud Technology is and the features and benefits it provides. This will include a range of topics, from hypervisors and Virtual Machines to Kubernetes, and then more advanced capabilities, including Enterprise Services.  

Third, we will show how Cloud Technology can help resolve most of the challenges presented in the problem statement. This includes applicability of the technology, features, and benefits of CSHC solutions addressing the challenges. 

Then, we will discuss successful Transition to CSHC Solutions from where we are today. 

Finally, Understanding the Vision of Digital Transformation using CHCS will show that application of these new technologies will require a transition with Enterprise Standard Architecture and standards.