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Defense and intelligence organizations need access to authoritative geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) to make decisions and act with confidence. Satellite imagery is foundational to GEOINT because it enables analysts to understand and model the locations and characteristics of land, facilities and equipment. But historically, organizations have been challenged to deliver satellite imagery to all personnel who need it, from top-level decision-makers to mission planners to boots on the ground. The two main reasons for this deficiency have been access and bandwidth. Nationally collected imagery was highly restricted and tightly controlled, primarily to prevent adversaries from discovering collection capabilities and timelines. But with the emergence of commercial providers in the 1990s, satellite imagery has become more and more unclassified. Meanwhile, rapid advances in cloud computing and data storage now make it possible to provide entire image libraries to all authorized members within organizations. As pioneers in commercial satellite imagery, DigitalGlobe has been at the forefront of making GEOINT available and accessible. We continue to lead the way with SecureWatch, the premier cloud-based imagery service for rapid access to geospatial intelligence. SecureWatch provides on-demand access to the entire 17-year DigitalGlobe imagery library, as well as fresh images, as they become available, from DigitalGlobe’s constellation of five high-resolution Earth-imaging satellites. DigitalGlobe processes more than 1 million square kilometers of imagery daily to make new content available to view and download at full resolution. When imagery content that meets a user’s requirement for currency is not available, the user can place an order for a new collection directly through the SecureWatch interface. This capability allows DigitalGlobe and its customers to track change as it is happening on Earth, understand and address our most pressing global challenges together.
SecureWatch provides access to the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite imagery (up to 30 cm with WorldView-3 and WorldView-4) and sophisticated search and analysis tools through a simple and secure web interface. The service is accessible with a browser on a desktop PC, laptop or mobile device, and it is also available through secured web services that stream the imagery to a variety of GIS and image exploitation software packages. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="789"] A view of Severodvinsk, Russia captured by WorldView-3 on June 14, 2017, in the SecureWatch platform.[/caption] Our teams continue to work to further enable our mission partners’ workflows and decision processes through products like SecureWatch—making it possible for personnel at all levels of defense and intelligence organizations to access foundational GEOINT content to make critical decisions based on facts. This is the first in a series of blogs detailing our expanding capabilities. Future posts will cover how DigitalGlobe delivers multisource imagery to enable persistent location monitoring, and how analysts can derive further insights from imagery when it is combined with rich layers of geospatial content. Visit our product page to learn more about SecureWatch and request a 30-day evaluation account.
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