Data lies at the heart of Defence decision-making. This is true for every part of the Defence ecosystem, including those behind the scenes working to design and maintain assets such as warships and fighter jets.
Enhancing the management of data is crucial to optimising decision-making around assets, which is why a NATO country’s Defence department sought to deliver a data centralisation programme for its Navy frigates. It required one system that connected fragmented frigate data, making the information necessary to design and maintain the ships more accessible, transparent and easy to control.
Through an in-country partner, the department worked with BAE Systems Digital Intelligence to deliver an Integrated Data Environment (IDE) programme for its frigate data – the first solution to be deployed onto a new, restricted Azure cloud environment.
The Challenge
Before moving the frigate data into the new cloud environment, the NATO member country faced a few key challenges. The data itself was generated over two decades and spread out across four disparate legacy sources, which meant laying the groundwork to standardise data sets was a top priority.
Security and effective collaboration was also front and centre. The country had to be aware of the work taking place in tandem to roll out the new cloud service, ensuring the maturity of this environment before migrating the frigate data.
The Solution
Providing our Intelligent Complex Asset Management technology, we worked together to deliver an IDE programme to standardise, optimise and upload the country’s frigate data to the cloud environment via a phased approach.
When complete, the IDE will provide end-users with numerous capabilities in one place, from controlled information sharing and automated workflows, to reporting and data quality monitoring. This will give decision-makers the ability to better manage the Navy frigates, in turn optimising their availability and cost efficiency.
The Results
While still early in its implementation process, the programme is already providing benefits to the NATO country’s Defence department.
Due to the phased, collaborative approach, the first data consolidation phase has been delivered with clear focus, with early feedback pointing to improved data quality and accessibility. The team has successfully processed over 1.2 million data records, initially transferring these from the existing systems into the new IDE.