Information Technology Priorities Shift for Geospatial Intelligence
February 24, 2022
By Kimberly Underwood
Agency technology leader identifies the need to employ “uncomfortable” practices in the intelligence community.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has been a government leader in cloud adoption and development security operations for software development. Among other efforts, the agency now is trying to foray into practices not widely employed before in an intelligence community setting, including the use of commercial solutions and expansion of unclassified operations.
The 25-year agency that came about in the mid-1990s during operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm has specialized in what it calls “knowing the earth,” explained Mark Andress, the NGA’s chief information officer (CIO), outlining the agency’s technology priorities yesterday during a panel session at the AFCEA Rocky Mountain Chapter’s annual Cyberspace Symposium, held February 21-24 in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
“We essentially transitioned from flat maps on local terrain to [supporting] GPS-enabled extremely long-range precision weapons…. bringing a merger between photographic interpretation, exploitation and mapping,” he said.
https://www.afcea.org/content/information-technology-priorities-shift-geospatial-intelligence
