But Hydra could play a role in yet another trend that we’re seeing in the military that puts high importance on network transparency – the establishment of an integrated military satellite architecture that incorporates both COMSATCOM and MILSATCOM assets.

To understand the importance of an integrated architecture and why Hydra is such an essential component, we first have to explore why the military is so adamant about integrating their purpose-built satellites with commercial services.

Bringing it all together
Most of the military’s communications that need to be sent over satellite networks travel via their purpose-built WGS satellite constellation. But there are a limited number of these satellites, they’re all located in Geostationary orbit, and the amount of bandwidth and capacity on the network is limited. In today’s increasingly network-enabled and software-dependent military, limited bandwidth and capacity can be a problem – practically everything on the battlefield will soon require connectivity.

To increase satellite capacity, the military can either purchase new satellites that they will launch and manage, or they can utilize commercial satellite services. One of these things – commercial satellite – is available immediately. The other – building more WGS satellites – could take a half-decade or more to get built and operational.

“If an adversary denies a satellite…having the ability to manage and control the network to send traffic around that network segment – either to other available military satellites or commercial satellites – could be the difference between having comms and not having comms.” – Amit Katti

But there’s more to commercial satellite than just immediate access. Commercial satellite solutions bring other benefits to the table. As Frank Backes, the senior vice president for Federal Space at Kratos, explained in a recent Government Satellite Report interview:

“…an integrated architecture allows the military to leverage the investments the commercial sector has made in innovative technologies. Advanced commercial technologies have added benefits, including increased resilience to interference, jamming, or environmental effects, far more rapid resource allocation, improved situational awareness, and increased bandwidth utilization efficiencies.”

Backes also noted that the WGS constellation faces concerns other than a lack of capacity and bandwidth. The military also has to worry about jamming and kinetic attacks from its largest adversaries – nation-states that have already demonstrated their capability to attack satellites in orbit. By integrating commercial and military satellite assets into one, integrated architecture, the military can seamlessly recover from one of their own satellites being denied.

“…there are not many satellites in the constellation,” Backes explained, “and some consider them easy targets to peer adversaries. Operating as a seamless network enterprise gives the military more options allowing flexibility, scalability, and resiliency.”

Integrating commercial and military satellite assets into one, comprehensive satellite and network architecture gives the military access to more innovative solutions much more quickly, while increasing their satellite capacity, and improving resiliency should WGS satellites be jammed, attacked, or otherwise denied. With all of those benefits, why haven’t they made an integrated satellite architecture the standard already?

Transparency and control
If MILSATCOM resources, such as the satellites in the WGS constellation, are denied, an integrated COMSATCOM and MILSATCOM architecture would enable the military to quickly and seamlessly transition to commercial satellites to fill their communications requirements. While that sounds easy enough, when you stop and think about everything that is required for that handoff to happen, it becomes both incredibly complex and technologically difficult.

“Transparency and control are two challenges that have traditionally stood in the way of an integrated MILSATCOM and COMSATCOM architecture. Hydra is an essential tool for giving the military the transparency and control it needs to better incorporate COMSATCOM into its operations and missions in the future.”

For starters, the military would need to know exactly where the problem resides. They would need to know that a WGS satellite is being denied, or the amount of capacity they need for the mission is available – and the problem doesn’t reside somewhere else within the network. Once they determine what the problem is, they would then need the situational awareness to know which COMSATCOM resources were available in that theater, secure capacity on those resources, and seamlessly transition all of their traffic and workloads over to the COMSATCOM network.

There are a lot of moving parts in that process. And almost all of them require transparency – both into their own, military networks and the networks of commercial partners. Also necessary in that process is a certain level of command and control to identify available commercial assets, acquire them, and begin operating with them. These are all things that have held up the integrated MILSATCOM and COMSATCOM architecture in the past. But they’re challenges that industry partners are rapidly working to overcome.

Hydra is one of the important tools and solutions that can help deliver the transparency, command, and control that the military needs to make the integrated satellite architecture a reality.

Hydra was developed in-house by SES Space and Defense specifically for its government partners. It aggregates network information from across a user’s network – including both terrestrial and space assets – and allows the user to build custom dashboards that put all necessary network information on a single pane of glass. This means that government and military users could use Hydra to build a dashboard specifically for a mission, and use that dashboard to quickly and effectively identify problems. Should the problem reside in the space domain, Hydra then gives them the command and management tools necessary to fill their requirements with COMSATCOM solutions.

“Integrating commercial and military satellite assets into one, comprehensive satellite and network architecture gives the military access to more innovative solutions much more quickly, while increasing their satellite capacity, and improving resiliency should WGS satellites be jammed, attacked, or otherwise denied.”

According to Amit Katti, a Principal Engineer at SES Space and Defense, “If an adversary denies a satellite – either disables it with a kinetic attack or jams its signal – having the ability to manage and control the network to send traffic around that network segment – either to other available military satellites or commercial satellites – could be the difference between having comms and not having comms. Platforms like Hydra are going to give the military the management and control data that they need to make that dream scenario a reality.”

Transparency and control are two challenges that have traditionally stood in the way of an integrated MILSATCOM and COMSATCOM architecture. Hydra is an essential tool for giving the military the transparency and control it needs to better incorporate COMSATCOM into its operations and missions in the future. The platform is cracking open the door to an integrated COMSATCOM and MILSATCOM architecture, which is imperative for the network and software-enabled future of our military.

“Hydra allows them to request, monitor, and orchestrate commercial satellite services within their contract boundaries,” added Katti. “If a military communications satellite is taken offline, being able to orchestrate commercial satellite capacity to fill that void is imperative to meeting an operation’s comms requirements without interruption.”

To learn more about the new Hydra common operational picture platform, click HERE.

The post The role of Hydra in an integrated COMSATCOM and MILSATCOM architecture appeared first on SES Space and Defense.

To say that the future of the U.S. military is more software-enabled, and more network-enabled than ever before would be a massive understatement. Everything that the military is developing and piloting for use in battle today needs connectivity.

Just look at the Army’s IVAS program, which is working to deliver an advanced augmented reality (AR) solution to the warfighter on the battlefield – putting important information, situational awareness capabilities, and other tools directly in their field of vision via a HoloLens headset.

According to Steve Kitay, the Senior Director of Azure Space at Microsoft, the IVAS headset will be augmented by Azure cloud services, and function to, “[keep] soldiers safer and [make] them more effective…[by] delivering enhanced situational awareness, enabling information sharing, and decision making for a variety of scenarios.”

And while this is certainly an exciting and revolutionary new tool in the warfighter’s kit, it’s only possible with connectivity in theater.

If everything that the warfighter relies on in theater is going to become network-enabled, then connectivity needs to be assured. Training a soldier to rely on a tool that only works when connected would be setting them up for failure if the network that supports the tool can be degraded or denied. Resilient, assured networks are no longer “nice to have,” they’re mission-critical.

While that looks good on paper, assured networks are easier to discuss – or write about – than they are to implement in the real world.

Complexity and a lack of transparency impact uptime
The terrestrial networks that provide the backbone of our high-bandwidth connectivity at home are incredibly stable and reliable, with SLAs and uptimes that ensure that connectivity is almost always available. Unfortunately, those terrestrial networks, themselves, are often unavailable where the military and government operates.

In foreign countries and isolated geographic locations, terrestrial networks may not exist at all. If that infrastructure does exist, it could be unreliable, or it could be untrusted. But that’s not just a problem that the military faces abroad. There are large swaths of our own country with no high-bandwidth terrestrial networks due to cost, geography, or other reasons.

In these places, satellite connectivity is essential and necessary to deliver the high-bandwidth, high-throughput, low-latency connectivity necessary for the government and military to operate their next-generation, network-enabled platforms, devices, and vehicles.

“…Hydra includes an inventory management system that integrates shared and dedicated devices, circuits, and the space segment into the same contextual environment…[allowing users] to schedule and monitor the entire end-to-end network in a single, integrated pane of glass, diagnose problems more rapidly, and fix problems before they take applications, services, and capabilities offline.” – Amit Katti

But adding satellite communications to the network infrastructure for government agencies and the military effectively increases the complexity of the networks – giving them a network architecture that incorporates assets on Earth, and in space. Much like with a modern car that’s more of a computer than an automobile, this increased complexity can also mean that there are more things that can fail or more things that can go wrong.

Worse, the military is utilizing a number of disparate terrestrial networks, disparate terrestrial hardware, and utilizing space assets and networks that include their own military assets, as well as commercial assets. This creates a lack of transparency and visibility into everything that’s happening across the network – a problem that the military is actively working to fix by embracing a joint operating environment across all of the DoD’s branches and organizations.

For the government and military to ensure connectivity and have assured networks, they need the ability to see the entire network – both terrestrial assets and space assets – on a single pane of glass. If a single, unified view of the network and the individual devices connected to it were available, the government and military would be able to diagnose problems more rapidly, and fix problems before they take applications, services, and capabilities offline.

Luckily, such a solution now exists.

Increasing transparency and uptime with Hydra
Earlier this week, commercial satellite operator, SES Space and Defense launched a new common operational picture (COP) platform called Hydra that the company claims, “…provides end-to-end situational awareness in a single unified operational network platform.”

Hydra was built in-house by SES Space and Defense specifically for their government and military customers. The solution integrates network data from multiple different sources – including operational data from the company’s satellite networks – and enables users to display it on a single dashboard or pane of glass. This could effectively enable the government and military the opportunity to view everything happening on and within their networks in one place – increasing transparency and allowing them to identify and remediate problems with the network more quickly.

“In addition to providing basic M&C data, Hydra includes an inventory management system that integrates shared and dedicated devices, circuits, and the space segment into the same contextual environment,“ explained Amit Katti, a Principal Engineer at SES Space and Defense. “This ability to incorporate and visualize the entire network allows the customer to schedule and monitor the entire end-to-end network in a single, integrated pane of glass, diagnose problems more rapidly, and fix problems before they take applications, services, and capabilities offline.”

COP platforms, such as Hydra, could be revolutionary in enabling the military to better monitor their networks – both on Earth and in space – and identify problems before they bring down networks. With network-enabled and software-enabled devices, applications, and platforms making their way into every government and military mission and operation, the timing couldn’t be better.

Networks aren’t “nice to have” at the tactical edge anymore. They’re essential. COP platforms like Hydra are ensuring that these networks are always on and available to the warfighter. This way, the next-generation, high-tech tools that our government and military personnel rely on are there when and where they need them – even in the most remote and austere of environments.

In our next article on the Government Satellite Report, we’ll look at the military’s push for an integrated commercial and military satellite architecture, and how COP platforms like Hydra could help make that a reality.

To learn more about the new Hydra common operational picture platform, click HERE.

The post Hydra – delivering more resilient networks to a more network-enabled military appeared first on SES Space and Defense.