DCIS Cube: Defining Architecture Building Blocks for Next Generation Deployable IT Systems

NATO requires a new forward-looking architecture to guide upcoming refreshment and enhancement of its Deployable Communications and Information Systems (DCIS). Aiming to embrace latest technology trends and industries best experience, an open call invited relevant industries to contribute in a collaboration spirit towards a vendor neutral architecture definition. A series of workshops discussed architectural proposals for such “DCIS Cube”. Feasibility of key architectural principles and elements has then been demonstrated using prototype implementations, and vendor neutrality was validated. The DCIS Cube architecture building blocks describe a software-defined and virtualized deployable Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), used to provide deployable multimedia and information technology services, including communications networking and information assurance services. The description is vendor agnostic, with open interfaces between standard hardware building blocks, and the infrastructure and application layer, and open standards for automation and orchestration of infrastructure and applications. Implementing such architecture will enable NATO to provision all DCIS functionality on a standard hardware cube by software configuration only. Furthermore, it will enable NATO to exchange or uplift the hardware, infrastructure, application and orchestration elements of the architecture independently of each other following their individual evolution speeds.