Deliver Assured, Interoperable Multidomain C2 Comms Everywhere
Cloud technology has rapidly become ubiquitous in modern military and tactical operations, offering capabilities that traditional fixed infrastructure can’t quite match. Cloud-based systems provide rapid deployment, scalability, and global coordination — all critical advantages in complex, contested environments.
The Advantage of the Cloud in the Tactical Domain
The benefits of the cloud are undisputed in a stable enterprise environment, but cloud infrastructure also has the potential to deliver transformative benefits for those operating at the edge, including:
- Scalability: access enormous computing resources on-demand to handle surge demand during crisis situations
- Reduced Capital Investment: eliminate upfront hardware costs and pay only for resources used
- No Hardware Maintenance: focus on the mission, not infrastructure management, maintenance, or repairs
- Global Resource Sharing: dispersed operations centers access shared data instantly from anywhere
- Infrastructure as Code: deploy and reconfigure entire communications systems in minutes instead of weeks
- Built-in Redundancy: geographic distribution across multiple data centers provides inherent failover
The Critical Challenge: When the Cloud Goes Down
Despite these compelling advantages, cloud infrastructure faces an unavoidable reality in tactical operations: it’s not a question of if connectivity will fail, but when and for how long. Anyone who has served at the tip of the spear understands this reality.
Whether due to adversarial electronic warfare, natural disasters, physical infrastructure damage, cyberattacks, or simple network congestion, connectivity to centralized cloud resources can be disrupted at the worst possible moment.
Denied Environments are a Tactical Reality
Military and tactical response teams increasingly operate in DDIL environments. Unfortunately, enterprise-focused cloud services often falter in these conditions. Reliance on centralized cloud systems creates three fundamental challenges:
- Latency issues that prevent real-time decision-making
- Security vulnerabilities during data transmission
- Complete loss of functionality when connectivity fails
For tactical teams, any one of these failures can compromise mission success. The question then becomes: how can warfighters retain all the advantages of the cloud while ensuring that operations continue when connectivity inevitably fails?
REDCOM Sigma in the Cloud
REDCOM addresses this challenge with Sigma in the cloud, our proven Sigma ecosystem that merges the cloud with the edge. Sigma Cloud leverages popular cloud providers such as AWS and Azure without being fundamentally tied to them. This means you can enjoy the full benefits of the cloud while maintaining autonomous communication at the edge, even if the network backhaul fails. With Sigma in the cloud, you get the best of both worlds: the reliability of edge communication and the scalability of the cloud, ensuring your operations remain resilient no matter the circumstances.
Sigma is highly flexible, so the exact implementation is up to you. One such deployment option is a hub-and-spoke topology, as follows:
- The Sigma Hub Node: acts as an edge cloud instance running Azure- or AWS-compatible infrastructure with localized compute and storage, synchronizing with strategic cloud providers.
- Sigma Spoke Nodes: individual instances of Sigma or Sigma XRI, deployed at forward positions that maintain connectivity with each other and the hub node through the transport method of your choice.
- Strategic Cloud Layer: the persistent cloud instance hosted in AWS, Azure, or other providers that serves as the ultimate data repository and processing center when connectivity is available.
When connected to the cloud, data flows bidirectionally to enable synchronization and access to vast cloud resources. And when connectivity fails, the Sigma Cloud hub node maintains critical operations with local compute and storage.
Multiple Transport Methods: The Cloud as Network Bridge
A key advantage of Sigma in the cloud is its ability to integrate multiple communications pathways. The strategic cloud instance can serve as a bridge connecting various external networks:
- SIP Trunks for Global Connectivity: SIP trunking enables voice comms from Sigma nodes at the edge to reach any endpoint globally.
- RF for Tactical Resilience: For lateral communications between tactical nodes at the edge, radios deliver a proven, resilient, hard-to-disrupt transport method that doesn’t depend on fixed infrastructure. Spoke nodes and individual radios can communicate directly with each other via RF.
- SATCOM Links: Satellite connections provide connectivity to remote and mobile units where terrestrial options are unavailable. These links can connect tactical nodes to the strategic cloud when other methods fail.
Sigma nodes can adapt to changing conditions by intelligently routing communications across the available transport methods. With fault tolerance or high availability, Sigma can operate seamlessly on an Auto-PACE network by:
- Detecting connectivity loss between edge and strategic nodes automatically
- Maintaining operations on local edge cloud infrastructure without manual intervention
- Resyncing automatically when connectivity is restored, ensuring data consistency
- Enabling lateral communications between tactical nodes through RF and other available transport methods
Distributed Operations: Maximum Flexibility and Resilience
Leveraging Sigma in the cloud represents a fundamental shift in how we think about tactical communications infrastructure. Rather than choosing between the powerful advantages of cloud computing and the resilience of distributed edge systems, Sigma in the cloud delivers both simultaneously.
As warfare and tactical missions become increasingly technology-dependent, the communications infrastructure must be both powerful and unbreakable. Sigma ensures that organizations never have to choose between capability and resiliency — they get both, automatically adapting to whatever conditions arise.
If you’d like to see a demo of Sigma Cloud-Based Communications in action, reach out to our team at sales@redcom.com.
