During their recent plenary session in Ft. Worth, Texas, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC) made plans to initiate an adhoc working group on cloud computing. The group plans to focus on the technical, operational and business requirements for developing a "federal-grade" cloud infrastructure.

The NCOIC, formed in August 2004, is a unique collaboration of premier leaders in the aerospace, defense, information technology, large-scale integrator and services industries. The Consortium works in tandem with customers from around the world, each with a specific mission, to provide a set of tools that enable the development of network centric capabilities and products.

The organization was formed to support those who design and deliver systems for warriors, first-responders, and others as they seek to maximize information age capabilities.  The NCOIC's products will  continuously enhance systems and services' interoperability and operational resilience, and will reduce the cost of developing new capabilities, even as they become more prolific. For the procuring agencies, this will result in lower integration and administrative costs in the deployment of distributed systems that can interoperate easily, cost effectively and securely. NCOIC products include the NCOIC products include the NCOIC Interoperability Framework (NIF) and the Network Centric Analysis Tool (NCAT).

NIF provides an organizational construct for organizing the enabling guidance developed by NCOIC, as well as a repository for that information. The guidance provided by NIF is intended to complement the reference architectures being developed by governments, ministries, and other organizations, as well as the systems engineering processes and tools resident in industry. NIF affords interoperability implementation guidance to allow firms to develop system elements/nodes interoperable with systems/nodes being developed by others. NCAT is a collaborative, web-enabled questionnaire-based tool developed to assist NCOIC teams and member companies to enhance the likelihood and reduce the time and effort of member companies developing interoperable systems consistent with customers’ policies and guidelines, reference models and architectures.

Targeted goals in the initial draft charter for the Adhoc CloudComputing Workgroup include documenting government cloud computing best practices, architectures and blueprints and explore the effect of the cloud computing paradigm to the NIF and NIF-SD.

The group also agreed to participate in two near-term events:

• The Joint CCIF/OMG Cloud Interoperability Workshop on March 23rd in Washington, DC; and
• The anticipated DoD Cloud Computing for Tactical Networks event.

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