Next Generation IT Architecture for NOAA Ground Processing

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Environmental Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) acquires, manages and operations the U.S. flagship weather satellites in addition to providing science and data preservation services for all of NOAA. NESDIS supports its mission with a distributed IT infrastructure which is traditionally owned, maintained, and operated in house. Cloud computing, however, may provide increased efficiency, agility, and innovation in supporting operations, science and data preservation functions. NESDIS is actively exploring a future implementation of its end-to-end ground infrastructure that is cloud-enabled, secure, scalable, service based, life-cycle cost effective, and data source agnostic. We will present the NESDIS cloud computing strategic approach to enable common infrastructure, services and applications and how the organization is addressing technical cloud migration barriers and risks to inform the next generation NESDIS IT architecture, and how this architecture helps reduce the risk of deploying the next generation of weather satellites.