The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is working to enhance its drone program by seeking a cloud-based software provider for fleet management, according to a recent federal contract posting.
All you are doing is renting real servers (at a higher price) and accessing them over an insecure network. Not sure that paying more and being less secure is a good thing.
There are many reasons why it isn’t a good idea for a government agency, or anyone else, to rely on cloud services, but an insecure connection isn’t one of them. The real reason why the concept of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) was invented was to solve this problem, not access Netflix in other countries.
“Less secure” means 3rd party rental servers at a site designed for all sorts of global network access. I did not see VPN requirements in the story (nor the RFQ). There is also no mention of data access controls so we may have the same cringe-worthy situation like wide open FAA aircraft N-Number database and Pilot home address database.
I find it disturbing that the NTSB finds it difficult for a single program lead to manage 4 drone operators and 5 drones. The documentation of 5 assets and 4 personnel should be manageable with notecards, a single spreadsheet or database could be considered a luxury. Even after they expand to a team of 15 with 12 drones, I wouldn’t look to a system beyond spreadsheeets unless there is already something in place. Make them use Google docs or Office online like the rest of the proletariat! (the last part is sarcasm)
Reasonable people would pay $10K for a really good local server and maybe a weekend to get it running. The FAA is contracting it out for $47M and will take a year.
You decide if this is “streamlining” or not.
To me the essential point of this story is not the cloud, but the application software that they want to run. If they are smart, they will find some party that is already doing this at a similar scale, with similar requirements and see what they do. I don’t know why this would be different from any other asset management software, E.G one for managing a fleet of rental trucks
Actuall, it is. “the cloud” means high cost rentals from now till eternity.
Agreed, just get off-the-shelf management applications and run them in-house on a server that is low coast enough to be bought on a purchase card. Done. No need for VPN’s, renting cloud servers, hiring a team of techs for a year, no need for infinite rental contracts, no need for a $47 MILLION initial cost.
I didn’t get the impression that the 47 million was so late for cloud services, but for the whole package: custom application development, support, equipment, and off premises equipment. I agree that $47 million is way way overkill just for application hosting and storage hosting offsite. I’m just thinking of those debacles that I have seen before with custom application development under government contracts. This is actually the business I have been in for over 20 years. If you can get your people to adapt to a cots application rather than training your people to carefully think through their jobs and specify a custom system, you will be light years ahead
$47 million for, as the RFQ says, for “Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) UAS Fleet Management Software” and “We seek a cloud based, Software as a Service (SaaS) or Platform as a Service ( PaaS)Tea solution”
With my 30+ years in global software deployments, the requirements for the actual solution is $10K for a home brew system and maybe $200K if it was contracted out. $47 MILLION for an off the shelf simple database is obscene.
With respect, have you ever been under contract to deliver an IT system to the feds? I just looked at the RFQ, and there are a lot of requirements that have nothing to do with delivering a system that merely works. I have worked streamlined semi COTS for the feds as well as fully directed programs—the paperwork is formidable.
Note that I agree with you that the cost is obscene. But here we are. 
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