On 2 January 2026, Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi declared 2026 the Indian Army's "Year of Networking & Data Centricity", as The Week reported. The stated aim is to enhance connectivity, real-time decision-making and combat effectiveness. The Army Chief also acknowledged that networking and data-centricity were areas where the force needed to act faster. The previous focus year, 2024, was the Year of Technology Absorption.
What "data-centric" means in practice
A data-centric force treats information as an operational asset: collected once, shared across platforms, and available to whoever needs it to decide. For command centres, that changes three things:
- One picture, many viewers. Commanders, staff and units need to see the same situation at the same time.
- Faster decisions. The value of data falls quickly. A picture that takes an hour to assemble is already old.
- Joint work. Army, Navy and Air Force data has to meet in one place for joint operations.
Where command centres struggle
Most command centres still depend on people being in the same room, looking at the same wall of screens. That works for one headquarters. It breaks down when:
- staff are spread across bases,
- an exercise involves several formations,
- or a crisis needs experts who are not on site.
Where shared virtual environments fit
A shared virtual environment puts every participant in the same space, wherever they are, seeing the same models, terrain and live updates. It is useful for:
- Command exercises where formations rehearse together without travelling.
- Incident management where the response team needs one operational picture.
- Planning and review, walking through terrain or a facility as a group.
Security matters as much as capability. Systems for military use should be able to run on-premise and air-gapped, with data kept inside the organisation.
How Sky-XR supports it
Sky-XR is our shared virtual environment for command centres. Every participant sees the same models, telemetry and updates, live. It scales from a small review team to a full command exercise, and our systems are designed to run air-gapped and on-premise where policy requires it. Read more about our defence systems and technology.
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