Variable Continuity of Operations/Service-Oriented Architecture (COOP/SOA) Services

Continuity of Operations (COOP) has taken on new meaning in the 21st century with threats from terrorism, natural disasters and cyber warfare. The threat also extends beyond key personnel to Command, Control, Communications, Computers, and Intelligence C4I. Prior to 9/11 COOP was a cold war relic that was focused on maintaining the government after a nuclear strike. Post 9/11 when the realization that terrorists could destroy significant parts of the government/infrastructure in a short space of time COOP took on new meaning and significant. On the natural disaster front, hurricane Katrina exposed the government’s inability to maintain operations when the storm devastated New Orleans transportation, communication, power, and financial infrastructure. The cyber warfare threat is best expressed as “China’s ambitions extend to crippling an enemy’s financial, military and communications capabilities early in a conflict, according to military documents and generals’ speeches that are being analyzed by US intelligence officials. Describing what is in effect a new arms race, a Pentagon assessment states that China’s military regards offensive computer operations as “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stage of a war.”1 The events described above have caused a major shift in the COOP paradigm to focus on C4I systems. Specifically COOP for the Air Force is centered on legacy stove-piped systems which are brittle and difficult to maintain. It’s critical that techniques be developed to provide a systematic consistent approach to migrate the Air Force C4I systems to an agile SOA environment that will support COOP to meet the 21st century threats. As stated in the solicitation current (COOPs/SOAs) solutions are complex, inflexible and costly as demonstrated by long delays between failure and full restoration of critical operations. The fundamental issue is the inability for systems to separate out the meaning/importance (semantics) associated with critical processes from the application and physical infrastructure. This semantic separation will ensure critical processes can run on both unlimited bandwidth and constrained bandwidth environments on virtualized infrastructure. The operational process will determine which environment resources will be used based on the selection of the web service that will provide the semantic capability required.