Space Belt Secure Data in Space

July 2017 – In a telephone briefing with Cliff Beek, President of the Commercial operations at Cloud Constellation, we discussed their new Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellite business called SpaceBelt. The full product name is the SpaceBelt Information Ultra-Highway and it is the first global secure network of interconnected data centers that is housed on LOE satellites without requiring terrestrial pathways.

The system has a network of 13 LEO satellites that are connected by laser optics for satellite to satellite communications at 10GB data rates. The servers can do some application procession, but are not primarily compute or render servers. The main task is to support PB levels of storage on each unit, and be a secure storage node for global delivery. Unlike a CDN which is designed for multicasting, the system is a point to point network with end points being terrestrial USAT terminals.

The network is optimized for data and media content services on a secure, private protocol, connection. The bandwidth capabilities in association with the location of the satellites, allows for optimal use by content creators for dailies. This is especially important when working with global teams on high valued asset scenes. The ability to move the data just between planned endpoints, means there is no terrestrial landing mid-points that can become a week spot in the content delivery path where a data breach could occur.

Since the system is remote and managed by Cloud Constellation, the transport path is on an expensed SaaS model. This puts the whole security and transport under OpEx. The business model has clients paying a vetted partner in the uplink business, and the connectivity from the location of local capture storage is through an leased uplink transponder.