Hyperscale cloud and the power of partnerships: Helping NATO maintain peace and security

As NATO member countries review their defense needs, technology innovators are transforming the landscape of solutions that national security and defense agencies can consider to address complex threats. In this post, we’ll explore how strategic partnerships between cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and defense innovators can unlock the full potential of these disruptive technologies for NATO and its member countries.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) solutions transform decision-making

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) enables accurate situational awareness and real-time visibility for decision-makers. The innovators behind these powerful solutions turn raw OSINT into insights in real time so that decision-making is based on accurate data.

OSINT applications leverage hyperscale cloud infrastructure to process hundreds of millions of data points monthly and provide actionable intelligence to analysts at NATO.

Osavul is a provider of OSINT applications. It’s a 30-plus person startup founded in 2022, which leverages AWS to combat information and hybrid threats. Its battle-tested solution collects 10-20 million data points daily from 5-10 million sources including social media, websites, and messaging platforms. It uses AI to analyze multilingual content across text, images, and video. Intelligence analysts use Osavul’s tools to surface insights in seconds instead of days, including understanding adversaries’ activity in a specific geographical area. Cloud-based infrastructure provides low-latency data processing, which is critical for real-time, effective threat detection and analysis.

Likewise, in the Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) domain, commercial satellites typically produce over 20,000 high-resolution images a day. The ability to store, process, analyze, and derive intelligence from this amount of imagery is only achieved using hyperscale infrastructure.

The global AWS Partner Network (APN) includes enterprises such as Maxar, Planet Labs, Lockheed Martin, and NVIDIA, which provide dynamic space-domain awareness capabilities.

All of this can be achieved with enterprise-level security measures and compliance certifications. Technology frees analysts’ time so they can focus on higher-value tasks. They can process increasingly large datasets to shorten the intelligence lifecycle. Decisions are made faster and are informed by better data points.

Real-time event and risk detection

Dataminr is another innovator whose tools use OSINT to make national security and defense missions more effective. Dataminr’s data and AI need to function resiliently to drive decisions during crises. Every second of advance warning in situations from the battlefield to natural disasters can make the difference in keeping assets and people clear of danger. The speed and resilience of AWS compute and storage facilitates this critical advantage.

Dataminr ingests 43 TB of daily data points, drawn from more than one million texts, imagery, videos, and machine-generated data on channels including social media, news, blogs, sensors, cameras, audio scanners, and the deep web. It uses AWS infrastructure and analytics capabilities to deploy predictive AI models to detect events. An example could be an abrupt aircraft route change in Automatic Identification System data, plus social media images of smoke and first responders. The solution uses more than 35 foundational models—such as Domain Specific Language Models—to describe events concisely. Dataminr’s AI labels, locates, and assigns impact to all information generated. Such labelling enables data to be tuned to specific user needs across all geographies and domains of conflict. It also facilitates rapid integration into Command and Control (C2) and visualization systems needed to conduct military operations. Dataminr uses generative AI to update events in multi-domain environments, globally. Information is sent to users’ devices and there are alerts for users’ specified information needs. Users can integrate other tools to query the information.

Pairing alerts with other sources of understanding accelerates the Orientate, Observe, Decide, Act (OODA) loop. In February 2025, NATO announced a collaboration with Dataminr to expand the use of AI to strengthen NATO’s networks, enhance real-time insights, and bolster cyber and physical security.

Advancing peace and security through partnerships and hyperscale cloud

The strategic partnerships between AWS and defense innovators are fundamental to delivering peace and security. Hyperscale cloud infrastructure provides the scalability, security, and advanced capabilities necessary to handle the immense volume, velocity, and variety of data integral to modern defense operations.

Hyperscale cloud empowers defense organizations to rapidly develop and deploy resilient, scalable, interoperable, and next-generation applications—preserving the allied technological advantage over adversaries.

Luke Openshaw and Dmytro Bilash show how Osavul’s solution processes massive amounts of data and innovates rapidly, while meeting stringent compliance requirements in this video.

 NATO’s NITECH magazine explores how industry is supporting NATO and its member countries. Read the full article on page 108 of this edition of the online publication.