The Defense Department is looking west for ideas on how to do big data better.
Tom Morton, cloud strategist for the Defense Department, said DoD does not want to “take what Silicon Valley is doing wholesale,” but does want to learn how companies are using big data and what successes and obstacles they are encountering, according to a report in NextGov.
“Twitter does a whole lot more in big data than the [Defense] Department does right now, and they use it very successfully as other companies do,” Morton said, as quoted in the article. He was speaking at an event in Tysons Corner, hosted by immixGroup, on June 18.
In April, Defense Secretary Ash Carter unveiled a new cyber strategy that explicitly includes a partnership with Silicon Valley in combating growing cyber threats.
Related: Pentagon chief looks to Silicon Valley for cyber skills
“Looking out over the last 75 years, we’ve had a long history of partnership. Sometimes the bonds between the academy, industry, and defense were particularly close…like during World War II, when the Manhattan Project and the MIT Radiation Lab brought together our brightest minds, and the best of industry cranked out the ships, planes, tanks and bombs that won the war,” Carter said during a speech at Stanford University announcing the partnership.
