Military Cloud Computing Efforts Accelerated

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milCloud is a cloud-services product portfolio, managed by the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) that features an integrated suite of capabilities designed to drive agility into the development, deployment and maintenance of secure Department of Defense (DOD) applications. This Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution leverages a combination of mature Commercial off the Shelf (COTS) and government developed technology to deliver cloud services tailored to needs of the DOD, according to disa.mil.

CISRA, the company building the $500 million cloud computing infrastructure for the DOD told Nextgov.com that the private cloud — dubbed milCloud 2.0 — will have “15 to 20” defense and military customers ready to move unclassified data and applications to the cloud next month as part of three-year contract. Classified Defense and military data worldwide will be hosted by 2019. The data could include everything from drone feeds to personnel data — currently accessible through the department’s Secret Internet Protocol Router Network.

CSRA sped up its milCloud 2.0 rollout in response to the Defense Department’s push to accelerate cloud computing adoption. A steering committee tasked by the Pentagon is currently determining the specifics for a commercial cloud contract that could be worth billions.

Leading commercial cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and IBM, have existing contracts to host Defense data. But CSRA believes its milCloud 2.0 offering has advantages over a future commercial contract, including overseas capabilities and being hosted in the department rather than commercial facilities.

MilCloud 2.0 is a second effort by the Defense Information Systems Agency—the Pentagon’s information technology arm — to provide defense and military customers with an on-premise cloud computing option. MilCloud 1.0 was beset with many challenges, including slow provision times.