Google Military Grade Air-Gapped Cloud Will Lead to Secure Elections

Written by Chriss W. Street

The U.S. military embracing Google’s Air-Gapped Cloud and Artificial Intelligence tactical appliance is paving the way toward meaningful advances in civilian cyber-security applications ranging from crypto-currency trading to election voter integrity.

The United States Air Force quickly embraced network enabled cloud computing in the 1960s.  The innovation provided huge savings for hardware and administrative expenses; improved collaboration improvements for data sharing and mobility; faster systems and application deployment; and faster scalability and adaptability.  But the military has recently suffered horrific data breaches of its secure tactical cloud systems.

“We have found several instances on the unclass [unclassified networks] where errors in the hypervisor management side of different vendors have led to IP addresses being exposed to the public for a period of time,” Dave McKeown, chief information security officer and deputy chief information officer for cybersecurity at Department of Defense, said at the recent Billington Cybersecurity Summit. “Of course, the bad guys don’t wait. They are constantly scanning networks, looking for a door that they can go in and rummage around. We lost some data as a result of that.”

To protect its mission-critical data, the military is now employing air-gapping strategies on one or more computers to ensure that a high-security networks can be physically isolated from unsecured local networks and the public Internet.  But digital sovereignty isolation tends to inhibit access to perform maintenance, diagnostics, and upgrades. 

Google’s pioneering answer is creation of a 100 lbs. cloud-in-a-box.  The appliance is housed in a ruggedized case that can be carried by two people on foot.  The appliance meets Department of Defense impact Level 5 cloud security for data encryption, firewalls and a secure boot-up at any location. 

The appliance solution runs Google’s advanced cloud infrastructure stack that includes Kubernetes clusters, data security services and the Vertex AI platform that is physically segregated and incapable of establishing an external physical or wirelessly connection.