The military is working feverishly towards a joint operating picture and an integrated COMSATCOM and MILSATCOM architecture to enable more assured, resilient communications. A new solution announced today by SES Space and Defense could go a long way in giving the military the situational awareness, command, and control that they need to make that a possibility.
The new Common Operational Picture (COP) platform, Hydra, built by SES Space and Defense to exclusively serve the U.S. Government and military is a modular web-based monitoring and control system that provides end-to-end situational awareness in a single unified operational network platform.
Built, managed, and operated in-house by SES Space and Defense, Hydra collects, normalizes, and organizes data from different sources based on the mission or customer and distributes the information to the appropriate dashboard providing an interactive user interface of consumable data in a single pane.
Built on a cloud-native and micro-services architecture, Hydra is secure by design and incorporates the latest security and data processing technologies, ensuring mission assurance for government and military users.
The foundation of Hydra is the SES Government Terrestrial Network (GTN), which was built to synchronize operations across major global teleports, points of presence, and U.S. Government datacenters. The network integrates with Hydra, providing complete visibility and management capabilities to the customer and SES Space and Defense’s Network Operations Center (NOC) to optimize end-to-end system performance.
“Hydra is the convergence of tactical, operational, and strategic enterprise data in a single pane-of-glass view,” said President and CEO of SES Space and Defense, Brigadier General Pete Hoene, USAF (retired). “Having information in real-time can be the difference between mission success and mission failure. SES Space and Defense has identified the need for a tool that compiles and transforms open-source data in a customizable dashboard to help manage situations rapidly and allow in-real time informed decision making.”
Utilizing the new Hydra platform, SES Space and Defense customers across the government and military can get increased transparency and visibility into their network – including both terrestrial and space assets. This makes identifying and resolving problems with the network easier and more efficient, increasing network performance and assurance at a time when network-enabled platforms and applications are increasingly mission-critical for the government. The system will also make it easier for military users to stand-up new satellite resources and reroute network traffic to commercial resources, making the military’s vision of a more resilient and redundant satellite architecture that utilizes both commercial and military assets a possibility.