Cloudant, the company that provides the level of NoSQL data as a service, announced a custom development and strategic investment agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), an independent non-profit venture capital firm funded by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies.

As part of the agreement, In-Q-Tel will recommend to the institutions of the U.S. government to use the Data Layer secure NoSQL-based cloud database services of Cloudant host. The Web and mobile applications services will help the U.S. government to build scalable mobile and web applications in more flexible and interactive ways.

“Cloudant’s background managing big data for physics research, and its scalable cloud database, gives the company potential to address a range of government challenges,” said Robert Ames, Vice President in charge of Information and Communication Technologies at IQT. “We believe this partnership can help our customers build future applications that put big data and mobile technology to better use, faster.”

The Cloudant Data Layer is a collection of multi-tenant and single-tenant (private) that host database clusters and scaled across multiple top-tier data centers around the globe. Built on the Apache CouchDB document database, RESTful JSON API, and built-in MapReduce, it delivers built-in full-text search, low-latency, and highly-available data layer dynamic performance functionality.

Cloudant offers so-called “data layer”, which consists of providing users a cloud platform as a service (PaaS) with NoSQL support. This allows web developers of government agencies to schemaless development for JSON & other doc types without worrying about servers, their configuration or CouchDB software installation.

“Cloudant is helping some of the nation’s most innovative private enterprises build compelling new mobile and big data applications, and today’s agreement with IQT is a vote of confidence that our technology presents significant value to the federal government as well,” said Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle. “We see the potential for Cloudant’s technology to enable new capabilities to collect and explore data in real time.”

This announcement is associated with a number of updates to the platform. Just last month, Cloudant announced that the database provider’s software is now being leveraged for GAIN Fitness, a popular mobile app that originally used PostgreSQL.

Big Data and the nature of information intelligence

“As we’re moving thoroughly into the information age, there’s also been a push towards what could be seen as the Big Data age,” says Kyt Dotson, HackANGLE editor; “with advances in archiving technology and more ways to move bits its possible to lose the signal in the noise–and often some of what looks like ‘noise’ right now is actually going to be signal later.

“We’ve seen this with innovations from Splunk that add query layers onto large sensor networks for critical infrastructure and we’re seeing it now with intelligence divisions who compile and hash through a great deal of information. Outfits like the CIA and NSA have long used cryptographers, supercomputers, and other super-parallel computing infrastructures to help them cut through the noise to reveal the signal and the use of this technology falls notably within the umbra of the covert intelligence communities.”