Case Study | Covid Contact Tracing

TAK Cloud | Situational Awareness x COVID-19 Response

Challenge | In response to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in early 2020, government agencies quickly increased deployments of service members. These service members urgently needed resources to support them with situational awareness and logistical information. Among the agencies in need was the National Guard, whose thousands of users required swift establishment of TAK Server and ATAK support infrastructure.

Solution | Raytheon BBN quickly responded to the challenge, partnering with multiple TAK leaders to help meet the National Guard’s rapidly developing need. High-performance TAK server deployments that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) formed the backbone of the infrastructure, including the leveraging of the AWS Directory Service (user authentication). Other SaaS offerings from AWS GovCloud were also incorporated into the design, such as the Relational Database Service (RDS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). These features reduced the time needed for database administration while scaling computing capacity. 

In addition to designing the cloud infrastructure, BBN planned and coordinated the development of the server features for the response. As development progressed, BBN provided extensive working above and beyond regular hours to ensure a successful implementation. 

Outcome | With BBN’s dedicated contribution to the effort, the National Guard was able to deploy service members with much greater speed and efficiency. The National Guard service members were able to maintain situational and logistical awareness, understanding how to pivot and change deployment locations quickly, with ease and in real-time. Having the enhanced capacity to deploy service members in a more efficient and flexible manner was an important component of the government’s response to the unfolding pandemic.

The collaboration between BBN and other lead TAK developer groups in this effort ultimately led to the creation of a National Guard CROSSTALK TAK deployment. The deployment was notably used to support Recovery and Humanitarian Assistance efforts, providing critical logistical support in times of crisis.