Phantom™— Virtualized Information Systems for Communities of Interest

Communities of interest (COIs) are often established in response to emerging situations; the participants and their needs are fluid, and not completely known at the outset. Frequently, they include participants from different organizations, whose information systems are not integrated. To address the need which these fast-evolving, heterogeneous, and diverse COIs have for powerful, net-centric information services, ATC-NY, in collaboration with Architecture Technology Corporation, prototyped Phantom.

Phantom will allow a secure, virtual network hosting a COI to be quickly and easily established. As participants join and leave the COI and as the COI mission changes, Phantom will seamlessly modify the network topology and associated security mechanisms accordingly. Using Phantom, the creation of COI information systems will not require tedious set-up of dedicated servers and firewalls. Instead, Phantom will marshal the available (real) network resources to efficiently achieve the desired Quality of Service for these virtual networks. Thus, Phantom will allow coalitions to quickly and securely establish, maintain, and dissolve the information system infrastructure necessary for COI communication and collaboration. Because Phantom uses virtualization and standard network technologies, it will interoperate with other standards-based products including security products.