The U.S. Department of War faces a critical challenge: maintaining tactical superiority while operating on data infrastructure that increasingly strains to keep up with mission readiness. As adversaries rapidly adopt cutting-edge technologies, the DOW’s reliance on decades-old legacy systems and siloed data creates a widening capability gap. Addressing this opportunity for modernization means lower security risk, improved collaboration and a stronger national security posture.

While the push for modernization is a clear mandate, the costs of inaction — of continuing to operate on outdated systems — are significant. To remain competitive, the DOW needs to treat data as a strategic asset, ensuring it is visible, accessible, understandable, linked, trustworthy, interoperable and secure. Below, we explore three likely costs of inaction that could hinder a strategic advantage and the benefits of transitioning to a modern data platform.

The reality of legacy constraints

Siloed data and limited collaboration hinder critical decision making

Mission readiness and operational agility require interoperability. An inability to access and share data prevents effective collaboration and timely decision-making across commands and with mission partners. Consider a scenario in which a vehicle breaks down in the field. This single event triggers a cascade of data questions vital to a commander’s understanding of their unit’s mission readiness. To fix it, a commander needs to know more than just the vehicle’s location. The maintenance depot needs to know if the part is in local inventory or if it must be retrieved from a rear warehouse. They need a clear timeline for transporting the part and completing the repair.

Currently, much of this information is fragmented across disparate systems, potentially providing an incomplete view. By unifying these data points, including geospatial data, parts inventory and historical repair times, a commander could gain a comprehensive view of their unit’s readiness. This would enable them to predict their unit’s combat effectiveness and make faster decisions to support mission success. While this example is hypothetical, it reflects the potential real-world impact of data silos in time-sensitive and mission-critical situations.

High costs and complexity drain critical resources

High sustainment costs and complex management of legacy data systems divert critical funds and personnel away from core mission priorities. Maintaining these systems requires substantial funding, physical infrastructure, and specialized personnel to maintain old hardware and patch security vulnerabilities. In fact, government agencies report spending about 80% of their IT budgets on maintenance, including legacy systems, leaving minimal resources for innovation. With a modern and updated data and AI foundation, those resources could instead be used for more critical operations. 

Increased risk and stifled innovation erode tactical advantage

Aging platforms with outdated security protocols create risk. These systems were traditionally built on perimeter-based security models and cannot support the foundational principles of zero trust. Without modern encryption, multi-factor authentication and real-time threat detection capabilities, legacy systems can provide potential entry points for bad actors seeking to compromise sensitive military data. Furthermore, their inability to scale stifles performance and prevents the adoption of modern capabilities. This also prevents the ability to leverage the very AI and advanced analytics that could provide a decisive strategic advantage.

The modernization advantage: What’s possible with a modern platform

A modern cloud-native data platform helps transform decision-making at every level of command by breaking down data silos. At the strategic level, it enables collaboration across commands and with partners, allowing leaders to make decisions based on comprehensive, near real-time data analysis.

Modernizing from legacy data infrastructure also addresses two key constraints: cost and risk. By eliminating the need for extensive on-premises data centers and shifting to a cloud platform with a usage-based model that scales automatically based on demand, the DOW could lower its total cost of ownership and redirect critical resources from maintenance to the mission. Simultaneously, modern platforms offer enhanced security and governance protocols, leveraging zero-trust architecture, advanced encryption, continuous monitoring and automated threat response. 

Perhaps most critically, a modern data platform provides the foundation for innovation and the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. Legacy systems simply cannot support the data integration and computational power required for the AI applications that are essential for maintaining a decisive advantage. Modernization is a necessary step to unlock these future-ready capabilities and ensure tactical superiority for years to come.

Become mission-ready

The DOW’s data modernization journey is not just about technology; it’s about maintaining America’s strategic advantage in an increasingly complex threat environment. Legacy systems that once served the military well have become obstacles to the agility and innovation required for 21st-century warfare. However, migrating these vast systems can be a daunting task, filled with challenges ranging from planned downtime and data integrity risks to the limited number of cloud vendors that meet stringent DOW compliance requirements, such as Impact Level 5 (IL5). Snowflake’s mission is to make migration easy and simple. 

Snowflake: Where data does more for the mission

Snowflake helps government organizations maximize their data capabilities with an eye toward minimizing infrastructure complexity, maintenance efforts and costs, Snowflake provides a single, unified, cloud-based data platform that allows defense agencies to securely share and analyze data across departments and with mission partners, and accelerate innovation with a trusted data foundation for AI. By unifying data on Snowflake, the DOW could tackle priorities, such as logistics and supply chain, asset reliability and performance, financial management and cybersecurity. 

With Snowflake’s fully managed data platform, command centers can drive efficiency, maximize resources and free up technical resources to focus on the mission. Snowflake’s hyper-efficient design enables agencies to automatically scale compute resources to meet dynamic needs and leverage a consumption-based pricing model.

With Snowflake, government agencies can operate with confidence knowing critical data resides on a secure platform with built-in governance that supports stringent public sector standards like DOD IL4 and IL5, meets NIST requirements — including CAC/PIV support — and is available in select government cloud regions, including AWS GovCloud and Microsoft Azure Government.

To help organizations like yours move forward today, Snowflake offers a proven migration path to unlock mission advantage. Our tooling, such as SnowConvert, dramatically reduces migration timelines by automatically converting legacy code, turning months of manual work into weeks. 

Here are some statistics from Snowflake public sector implementations:

• NYC Health + Hospitals improved data delivery time from five days to five minutes for membership and claims data

• Florida State University saw a 95% faster time to value for internal stakeholders, sharing data in five days vs. 90 previously

• Community Transit now needs 77% less time to process 5x more transportation data after migrating to Snowflake

• Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation has a 3x faster run time of SQL jobs with Snowflake than their legacy systems.

For a complete list of our public sector authorizations, we invite you to visit our Trust Center. Additionally, Snowflake is expanding its secure data platform capabilities to include Impact Level 6 and higher requirements. 

We’re engaging select DOW and intelligence community leaders to understand current mission requirements and identify where these higher-classification investments can have the most impact. If your organization is planning for IL6 or above workloads, let’s chat, we’d like to include your input in this effort.