“Ukraine has a lot of data that it wants to provide to NATO,” NATO Under-Secretary-General for Operations Tom Goffus told Defense One on Monday at a joint training center in Poland. Due to the large volume of data that would be processed, the alliance decided on a cloud solution. “We hope to be operational in January 2026,” added Goffus.
War is increasingly a matter of data provided by various sensors. However, it must be passed on, linked with others and evaluated in order to choose the best response.
All equipment is already available to transfer data from Ukraine. “What we don’t have yet are policies on how to accredit the system so that it can be used safely,” Goffus said.
“All of our tools are designed for network security, and we want to move to the cloud, which is one of our biggest challenges.” Goffus will therefore be talking to major US cloud service providers who “work with secure clouds at the level of secret and possibly even higher”. The key is that the accreditation and application process works.
Alliance data backbone
It is not just about using data from the Ukrainian battlefield. The goal is much more ambitious, it is to link data at the alliance level. The vision for the future is to integrate data from partner countries into the system and provide them with a central cloud solution,” said Goffus.
“I think NATO needs a cloud solution, an open architecture to integrate things that countries buy. Countries buy sensors, sensor sets that deliver data, NATO does the data integration,” Goffus said. “The overall strategy should be moving more in that direction at this point, and joint funding would help ensure that we have a data backbone, a common data layer that everyone can draw from.”
It is intended to be a completely new solution from scratch to circumvent the limitations of existing systems that only connect at the federal level. Therefore, available open architectures are used, but the entire system will be owned by the US government.
The volume of data is enormous, because only each F-35 fighter has several sensors and radars from which it transmits data. It can, for example, transmit target coordinates to the HIMARS salvo rocket launcher. However, the effort is that all data, including satellite, can be connected.
