Key Technologies for National Security

Big Data and advanced analytics, enterprise mobility, visualization and cloud computing are some of the key technologies that will drive national security requirements in the future. These technologies make distance meaningless and they all rely on speed to succeed. They require both offensive and defensive strategies.

The Cloud empowers small groups and individuals to do exceptional things. It changes the pace of innovation now that actors can de-couple technological capabilities from the cost of owning the infrastructure. Cyber is a growing threat and requires new thinking of solutions that gets the balance right between national security threats and privacy concerns.

“Digital exhaust” centralizes information thus allowing bad actors to identify and track people using facial recognition and analytic technology.

In the visualization world “augmented reality” is redefining how nations use computers; it blurs the line between physical and virtual worlds.

Those that use social networks to foster communities, learning and co-creation will allow next generation activities related to micro-blogging, social networks and user-generated filtering.

But technology is a double-edge sword – the Cloud has given rise to private and non-state actor ‘intelligence’ industries. So ‘latent semantic indexing’ and ‘pattern matching technologies’ are here to stay.

Creating an ‘agile development’ process with two week sprints and outputs is the new norm. This reduces the long lead time for development and deployment. It requires new public-partner partnerships, technology transfer to international partners, host government policy reforms, and capacity-building.

In the private sector, not for profit organizations have brought together hundreds of small, next generation technology companies to showcase their efforts.

Private sector leaders frequently say: ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’. Access to private sector technological developments is key.