The 557th Weather Wing (WW), formerly the Air Force Weather (AFW) Agency, stands alone as the Air Force’s premier weather wing, providing world-class weather support and decision superiority to commanders and warfighters to “win today’s and tomorrow’s fight.” Invictus has supported the 557th WW and its previous AFW designation since 2021 with cybersecurity services to engineer, develop, and implement next-generation cloud and cross-domain services.
The Challenge
Our 557th WW customer requires a more scalable, sustainable, and secure Cloud-Service provider Cross Domain Solution (CDS) to meet the high demands of sharing more than 80TB per day of some of the most diverse data and file types. Such a request requires extensive development, integration, and implementation support.
The Solution
Invictus is developing a Cloud Native (CN) workflow engine tailored to support 557th WW CDS requirements to interact with the Amazon Web Services (AWS)-native Object Transfer Service – an AWS-managed CDS. To this end, Invictus leverages AWS-managed services and integrates open-source technologies as part of the workflow engine and pipeline, aligning to the 557th WW Enterprise Cloud Strategy and target architecture design objectives to maintain interoperability. The solution exceeds all initial 557th WW mission data and software artifact CDS transfer objectives; for example, our approach includes algorithms to route 557th WW data dynamically sets to Deep Content Inspection and XML transformation engines ensuring well-known data types (PNG, PDF, XML, JPEG, etc.), weather-specific data types (GRIB1/GRIB2, NetCDF, RSDR, etc.), and software artifacts (RPM, EXE, JAR, Containers, etc.) are handled based on the 557th WW Authorizing Official risk tolerance. Additionally, when needed, Invictus tailors our dynamic brokering and microflow engines to support Reliable Human Review (RHR) of high-risk data sets such as Software Artifacts.
The Impact
This solution is currently in the development and testing phase and poised to introduce a cutting-edge workflow. Once implemented, it will revolutionize data sharing by disseminating over 80TB of weather data daily to every unit across the US Air Force and US Space Force worldwide. This result will significantly streamline the current process of distributing weather data across disparate networks to these units, yielding substantial cost savings and increasing the security and accuracy of shared data, marking a significant advancement in operational efficiency and mission readiness.