Want a really secure cloud? Cloud Constellation is putting one in space.
Cloud service providers frequently tout the physical security of their data centers. But Scott Sobhani's company is getting ready to launch what is perhaps the most physically secure cloud platform ever (literally). Sobhani is CEO and co-founder of Cloud Constellation Corporation, the company behind Space Belt—a network of communication, compute, and data storage satellites that is aiming to provide more than an exabyte of storage in orbit by 2025.

Led by a team of satellite industry and cloud computing veterans, Cloud Constellation launched three years ago in "stealth mode" to find a way to provide customers—particularly government and international enterprises—with a really secure and highly available global cloud.

"You can clearly see that today's Internet and other systems that are supporting cloud operations and cloud storage are very leaky and very prone to cyber attack at every junction as well as delays," Sobhani told Ars. "The information superhighway is very enabling, but it is also very risky, and IT directors and CIOs are subject to a lot of pressure and loss of sleep at night over all the issues that can happen, because what they buy today to [secure their systems] may not be adequate for the future."

The Space Belt, he claims, will offer a much more secure and in some cases better-performing alternative. It's an "information hyper-highway," as Sobhani puts it. "We've created a system that can isolate the data and have it flow point to point from your very secure encrypted satellite terminal at your enterprise or government site to connect all of your enterprise or government sites around the world seamlessly on one unified telecom backbone," he said.

Whether Space Belt is hyper or just hype won't be clear for a while—Cloud Constellation plans to make the first flight of Space Belt satellites by the end of 2018.

Space expressway

Generally speaking, satellite-based anything is the last thing you'd think of as a way to increase the speed of moving data around and its availability. But Space Belt, Sobhani said, is based on patent-pending technology that "makes latency disappear without breaking the laws of physics." The satellite network will consist of satellites in a variety of low-earth orbits linked together by laser data links. It's a sort of orbiting fiber backbone without fiber.

Additionally, the satellite network will be able to accommodate any existing satellite-to-ground communications link, allowing a "cross-strap" between virtually any pair of ground stations. "I can accept RF from any band that I can see—X, L, S, Ku, Ka, C band," Sobhani said. "[And I can] have that communicate with any other party on the Space Belt through this homogenous link that we have, the optical link."

This setup means that trains, planes, and automobiles (as well as ships, drones, trucks, and corporate offices) could have a persistent connection to a common cloud backbone.

The relatively low planned orbit of Space Belt's satellites and the 10-gigabit laser communications links between them will eliminate two of the biggest sources of latency in satellite communications. The system will also eliminate the need to get an orbit allocation from the International Telecommunications Union. Most current satellite communications depend on geosynchronous satellites orbiting at an altitude of more than 22,000 miles. As Grace Hopper would have said, that's a very large number of nanoseconds for signals to travel up and down. And since most satellite communications is simply relayed radio signals, a signal may have to be sent up and down multiple times to get to its destination—especially if it needs to be "cross-strapped" to another satellite band for delivery.

But the network is just part of the whole Space Belt product pitch, and that idea was borne out of Cloud Constellation's broader goal—distributing cloud services themselves in orbit. "The entire Space Belt system can be viewed as one large drive or one large data center," Sobhani explained. "Or, it can be considered as many small data centers interconnected together as you do today." The company believes data can be stored and replicated in space, and it expects to offer at least a one-to-one ratio of customer storage to backup, distributed across multiple satellites. Conceivably, customers could "shred" data that was uploaded to Space Belt, Sobhani said, so that the encrypted storage aboard satellites offered the ultimate in data security.

"At the very least, for every petabyte we sell there should be a petabyte of backup on another satellite as backup," Sobhani explained. "If a government or enterprise decides to keep more storage on the ground, they should have the freedom to do that; if they want to shred it as it goes to space, for security, that should be their prerogative." Either way, the goal of Space Belt is to provide whatever level of data replication within its network that the customer wants.

Sobhani has previously been a vice president at Hughes, Lockheed Martin, and Astrolink. He said that the capacity of Space Belt—in terms of network bandwidth, computing power, and storage—would scale up as more satellites are added. The initial network, he said, will have petabytes of storage and offer distributed computing power as well. It'll all be aboard satellites that are essentially orbiting data centers. "Those data centers can do anything you'd like to do with data centers on the ground—storage, processing, video transcoding if need be," Sobhani explained. "There are a variety of applications that you'd want to do this way over using terrestrial hardware."

Sobhani claimed that data will be able to reach anywhere in the world with relatively little latency. That's not necessarily what you'd expect from services that use terrestrial content delivery networks, but it's certainly better than what's available in places without widely available broadband. By having the actual cloud in orbit, other application latencies could also be reduced. And in parts of the globe where terrestrial bandwidth is at a premium, it could even offer an escape valve of sorts for network providers—giving them a way to bridge directly to high-capacity networks with fewer network hops. For applications like live two-way video feeds, which in some cases have delays of up to 30 seconds when routed over terrestrial networks, Space Belt could in theory cut that delay down to less than a second.

For other applications where the data already has to transit satellite links (think drone control and remote sensing systems), the system could perform all of the work of preprocessing images and make them available much faster than if they were pushed back to a terrestrial network for processing. "We are also able to host Earth imaging and sensing data distribution [on] our satellite network," Sobhani explained. "We can take the data as it's being collected—for instance if someone is taking pictures of a swath of the globe, we can take the data and immediately put it on the cloud so it's available to any authorized party on Space Belt. We feel that'd be a huge savings for the people in the remote sensing business."

The Neutral Zone

There are other advantages to being in space. You don't have to be Hugo Drax to understand the security benefits of putting your essential assets in orbit (although that security is probably better if you're not a Bond villain). Totally hands-off provisioning and secure encrypted access mean that nobody's going to be tapping into your backbone or checking out your database tables. The challenges of physical access to a system distributed across multiple satellites are not surmountable by anyone without a space program.

There's also the unique legal status of space. While not exactly precise, as the fictional astronaut Mark Watney noted in Andy Weir's The Martian when declaring himself a "space pirate," space is conceptually covered by the Law of the Sea and not considered part of any nation. That's something that Sobhani's company hopes will allow Space Belt to operate in a way that gets around laws restricting the movement of data.

"What happens is that in certain regions, it has become very important—imperative—to protect private data of citizens in that area," Sobhani said. "You find that more and more jurisdictions are putting control on how data can flow out of and in their territory." That creates, he explained, "a situation of exclusion for those who don't have the deep pockets to participate in those economies. And you have a real issue with respect to how to guarantee a country or [regional organization, such as the European Union] can assure that data would be contained in your territory."

Sobhani believes Space Belt will offer a cheaper, more secure way for companies to meet those restrictions technically. "If you were to compare the use of a data center to the Space Belt system, it's much cheaper to buy a data center," he explained. "But then you'd also have to compare [the cost of] paying for the ingress and egress of data and the end-to-end telecom backbone connectivity that a company would have to have with the telecommunications companies of the world."

The CEO believes much of that capacity for leased lines is underutilized. That cost gets passed on to cloud service providers, he suggested. "So what we really do plan to do is become a wholesale offering for cloud service providers to become differentiated in the marketplace. And the cloud service provider that's on Space Belt would have a very superior product and be able to charge less if they desired to do that—and it would be end-to-end, point-to-point, all inclusive without touching another network at all."