South African Space Agency takes IT into the cloud
The South African National Space Agency (SANSA) is a governmental organization with a rich history in space research, innovation, and involvement in space science and technology. Established in December 2010, its mandate encompasses a broad range of objectives, including advancing space science and engineering, supporting industrial development in space technologies, and promoting the peaceful use of space.
The agency is dedicated to developing human capital in scientific engineering and growing South Africa’s industrial capabilities in space technologies. SANSA’s activities include satellite development, earth observation, space research, and collaboration on international space missions. Additionally, SANSA collaborates with international space agencies and organizations, contributing to global space research and technology advancements.
Using Amazon Web Services (AWS) can bring substantial benefits to SANSA. AWS offers a highly scalable and reliable cloud infrastructure that can accommodate the agency’s complex compute and data storage needs. By leveraging AWS services, SANSA can enhance its data processing capabilities, enabling faster analysis of satellite data, which is crucial for Earth Observation and space research. Moreover, AWS provides robust security features, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive space-related data.
AWS’s global network of data centers can help SANSA establish redundancy and disaster recovery mechanisms, ensuring uninterrupted access to critical IT resources. The scalability of AWS also allows SANSA to adapt its IT infrastructure to changing requirements, particularly during satellite launches and major research projects. Overall, embracing AWS for its IT operations can enable SANSA to accelerate its space research, enhance collaboration, and ensure the integrity and availability of its valuable data assets.
For the SANSA Space Science division, instrumentation data needs to be collected, processed, analysed and distributed to users as quickly and efficiently as possible to be valuable. With the existing on-premises systems, it was becoming difficult to process quickly and efficiently, and to make information available to customers.
Users are becoming more sophisticated and their information expectations are increasingly evolving to receive more information more regularly – existing system needed attention to align with user demands. At the same time, the repositories of archived data was becoming costly to store and protect on-site. An alternative solution was imperative.
The agency quickly recognised that a cloud solution would meet its needs, and specified a solution based on AWS. SANSA Space Science published request for proposals (RFP) with a number of AWS services specified: Amazon API Gateway, AWS Direct Connect, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, AWS Snowball, AWS Lamda and AWS WAF. MFT responded to with an appropriate AWS technical solution.
SANSA Space Science are currently utilising AWS Direct Connect, VPC Endpoints, Amazon S3 and Amazon Lightsail. The agency has a private, secure and dedicated communications link to AWS for long term storage of archived data and serverless web hosting. Ongoing usage of AWS will see the processing and distribution of instrumentation data on AWS.
This will most likely not be the end of SANSA’s journey with AWS, as cloud services provide the agency with the ability to meet customer expectations with speed and cost-effectively.
