All roads lead to I/ITSEC…a blog series – part 3

summary

Building a credible and trusted reputation in any industry is a difficult feat, achieving this in the most demanding sector in the world — Defence — is even more so. Read on to find out how we did it.

Defence
8 min read

How do you garner trust and credibility in the defence space?

If you have been following our series leading up to I/ITSEC 2022, thank you and welcome to the next chapter, so to speak. For those of you who are just finding this, you’ve missed a bit, but no worries you can catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 to bring yourself up to speed.

We’ve been detailing Hadean’s journey to becoming a well established and trusted partner in the defence sector. It’s an achievement we’re proud of but it is also one that has come about as a result of the hard work, innovative talent and indefatigable passion of our team. 

Addressing the challenges in the world’s most demanding sector

Modern defence has to operate in an environment filled with significant challenges which have come about as a result of some interconnected factors which we touch on here:

  1. Globalisation and the rapid evolution of technology

The world is more connected than ever, it is possible to see how events taking place in one part of the globe have an immediate effect in other areas of the world. Technology, especially communications technology has played a huge part in driving this change and will continue to do so. The key issue will be the ongoing race to remain at the forefront of the latest developments and establishing ways to use it to best advantage.

  1. Higher demand for energy

The rise in demand as the world population increases, the soaring costs and its availability are all turning energy into its own battleground. Keeping these resources as well as the networks that power them secure is a fundamental preoccupation. 

  1. Climate change

Climate change is already affecting sea levels and we are witnessing more extreme climatic events which are part of the knock on effect. These events, in turn, lead to physical destruction, disease, famine and loss of life. All of which induce activities such as mass migration, as people shift away from the more impacted areas, leading to social unrest, instability, and potentially, conflict.

  1. Population increase

A continued rise in population is expected and inevitable, especially in developing countries around the world. Rapid increases in population brings the requirement for more homes, leading to urbanisation. For countries with emerging economies, who do not yet have the infrastructure in place to support the rise in demography it means the creation of shanty towns in suburban areas, riddled with security issues due to poor building frameworks and a lack of resources and supporting institutions. This combination of instances sets the stage for heightened instability and unrest that may not limit itself to just within the borders of the countries concerned.

A response to one or more of these challenges requires the ability to act quickly and decisively, and bring to bear all of the instruments of state and military. Data and novel information has to be processed rapidly and exploited efficiently. Any and all personnel being deployed to meet any emergencies or escalating situations as a result  of these factors have to be sufficiently prepared.

Hadean has built the platform to support Defence and ensure that they can meet these challenges head-on and maintain the technological advantage. 

Establishing credibility when you’re doing something completely new

Hadean’s superiority over the competition is embedded in the core technology through which our platform and products are running, as well as our approach to distributed and spatial computing as a key technological component, all of which enables Hadean’s customers to have a clear advantage. Currently, other platforms are attempting to offer a closed, turnkey solution, that are limited by nature, to address the support requirements of hybrid network environments, interop with legacy and new systems and use proprietary or standard protocols. Whereas, Hadean’s technology enables a seamless integration of third party applications and enables users to run in the chosen network environment, whether on public or secure clouds, on premises and air-gapped networks.

Other novel ways in which our platform is providing a credible support system as the next generation platform for defence are detailed below.

Synthetic Training Environments

The preparedness of military personnel is an overwhelming deciding factor between the success and failure of a mission. The simulation of real-world environments in a virtual space to incredibly high degrees of fidelity improves immersiveness and enables troops to train and better develop their skills, become familiar with operational protocols and tactics via convenient, secure and more cost effective means. Hadean’s technology takes this a step further by providing the infrastructure  to support a deeply integrated multi-domain single, synthetic environment, federating legacy and modern systems, which helps to achieve holistic preparedness as personnel from all domains can come together to perform joint training exercises.

Decision Support

When putting the challenges listed above into consideration, the ability to make well informed decisions is incalculably advantageous. With the Hadean Platform our defence partners are able to obtain high quality predictions because they are based on multiple explorable inputs. Unlimited “what-if” scenarios can be run to quickly generate purposeful insights. Potential incidents that could occur as a consequence e.g. a river flooding due to climate change or poorly constructed housing coming down in a crowded suburban area leading to an exodus of residents — all of these and more scenarios can be explored to reach the best decision. This same Hadean technology can be applied to create Enhanced Wargaming. Unlimited courses of action can be built out and assessed, complex scenarios both within virtual and constructive environments can be represented and reviewed, all at the point of need to achieve unparalleled insights.

Have a read of our white paper on Decision Support for Defence to understand more about the ways in which our infrastructure bolsters this key activity. 

Virtual Test and Evaluation

Due to the smart scaling capabilities of the Hadean Platform, vast, highly accurate digital twins can be built replete with representation of live data, weapons, environments, systems and subsystems all within highly realistic virtual test and evaluation environments, contributing greatly to effective training and strategic planning activities. 

One of our first forays into creating digital twins was with military aviation leaders, CAE. The project we collaborated on was the creation of an entire cityscape in which our platform was able to support two million continuously active AI-controlled entities. In speaking about our work on the project, CAE’s VP of Synthetic Environments & Innovative Technologies said: “our work with Hadean provides the scalability to replicate extensive environments and populations to gain actionable insights on challenges from climate change to health and safety, accelerating the development of world-changing innovations.”

The key factor that helps us to establish our credibility is that our technology seeks to eliminate the siloes, issues and glitches of previous systems to enable end users to enjoy a seamless experience. This is especially pertinent for the defence sector where a single glitch, no matter how minor, can be costly and increases the risk of vulnerability. 

Building trust with the defence sector through our capabilities

Hadean’s Platform is compatible across multi-cloud, air-gapped, on-premise data centres or clusters. It allows for unprecedented portability across all of these environments. Distributed cloud computing means that deployment is closer to the client resulting in lower latency. We also cut out the need for any middleware and removed the limitations that current approaches have because we have rebuilt the technology stack. The decision to construct our technology on Rust was not only to future proof it (as a programming language it is continuously improving) but it addresses speed requirements and has a stronger safety focus all of which lend themselves to trustworthy performance. Our recent collaborations with BAE, Thales, Plexsys and the British MOD are further evidence of our status as trusted partners. 

What being at I/ITSEC means for us

Our acute awareness of the multiple challenges being faced by the defence industry means that we are not standing still when it comes to the development and continuous evolution of our technology. Our unprecedented scalability and composable infrastructure is unparalleled, but we know that to be able to offer a truly future-proof product we must keep striving to provide unmatched, high performance solutions. Our attendance at I/ITSEC 2022 is an optimum chance for us to meet with and have one-to-one conversations with people from various areas within the defence industry. We will be there to demonstrate our capabilities but more importantly we will be there to listen and understand even more how we can continue to provide the most ideal solutions. Defence has enough challenges to meet, we are here to help bridge any performance gaps and provide the next level of support. 

So why not arrange a meeting or come by our booth (1460) to have a chat with us to see what solutions we can come up with for you?