Intelligence Agencies’ move to the Cloud: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to discover more about the challenges and opportunities faced by intelligence agencies wishing to move their data to the cloud. Intelligence agencies collect and process enormous amounts of data and information and need the tools to do so. Two intelligence communities have moved to the cloud to face these issues but there is little scientific knowledge about moving an intelligence agency’s data to the cloud. No research on the topic could be found and this study aims to fill part of that gap by using a case study research strategy and interviews with experts in the field. A literature review was completed to understand previously identified challenges when adopting cloud and was used to create two sets of interview questions. Five interviews were conducted, and a thematic analysis done resulting in fourteen themes. The themes revealed that there are many challenges with laws and regulations being the biggest one, while the opportunities brought by a cloud solution are the processing and analysis of data, and information sharing.