BAE Systems said Tuesday it completed a successful demonstration of its latest software to seamlessly share data from its geospatial intelligence platform at military cyber secure levels, amid growing interest from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community.
Company officials tested the XTS Guard 5 information sharing software for its Geospatial eXploitation Products (GXP) earlier this spring at an exercise organized by the office of the under secretary of defense.
“XTS Guard allows analysts and operators to share information in real time vs. stove piped database repositories. This search and discovery across domains gap has been identified by DoD as a key requirement for the coalition environments to allow search and discovery of vital ISR across domains and security boundaries,” Kevin Malone, BAE Systems’ director of analytics systems, told Defense Daily.
Malone said the intelligence community and cyber components in the DoD are actively looking for a potential geospatial imaging sharing tool.
XTS Guard functions as a cyber security tool to facilitate the sharing of geospatial intelligence between classified and unclassified domains.
This breaks down information stovepipes and secure boundaries that currently exist, providing a bridge between security domains to allow intelligence analysts to quickly and easily gather information that was previously cumbersome and time consuming to obtain,” BAE Systems officials wrote in a statement. “It saves analysts’ time, reduces operating costs, and allows decision makers to act more quickly.”
BAE Systems has deployed XTS Guard to U.S. customer’s networks since 2013 to handle analytics management, image exploitation, geospatial production and intelligence reporting from data sourced on its GXP platform.
“The XTS Guard and its multitude of functionalities for transferring email, email with attachments, files, socket-based connectivity, CHAT as well as search and discovery across domains can be utilized by DoD and IC customers alike, dependent on their data transfer requirements,” Malone said.
The software was demonstrated at the EC-18 enterprise challenge in May at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, and included attendees from the DoD, Canada and the United Kingdom.
“BAE Systems’ XTS Guard provided the security, filtering and sanitization of data as it traversed the various networks connected. Sterling Computers’ SmartXD handled the abstraction layer of the communications for harmonizing disparate databases across the customers involved in the exercise,” Malone told Defense Daily. “These two solutions, combined with BAE Systems’ GXP solutions, allowed analysts to gather and disseminate intel in real time.”