One of America's most influential think tanks feels the Navy should migrate to the cloud. Is that really a good idea?
The U.S. Navy loves sensors. The same gyrometers and motion detectors that fuel smartphones and Microsoft's Kinect also keep drones in the skies and aircraft carriers in sharp order. But the Navy--which is the size of a large global megacorporation and also saddled with a huge bureaucracy--also has problems dealing with the flood of data that sensors create. The RAND Corporation is arguing for something unorthodox to deal with that data influx: A cloud for the Navy (PDF).