By Lisa Ferdinando DoD News, Defense Media Activity
ARLINGTON, Va., March 14, 2018 — The Defense Department is
seeking an enterprisewide cloud infrastructure to ensure warfighters have
access to real-time, mission-critical data, DoD officials said March 7 at an
industry day for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud acquisition.
Having the departmentwide cloud infrastructure could mean
the difference between mission success or mission failure for warfighters, the
speakers stressed.
“This program is truly about increasing the lethality of our
department and providing the best resources to our men and women in uniform,”
DoD Chief Management Officer John H. Gibson II said. “JEDI Cloud is just one
contract and part of a much larger strategy for overall [information
technology] efforts.”
Global challenges to the military remain, he said, adding
that the department must consider significant reforms to best equip the
military to meet mission requirements.
“Leveraging the commercial cloud is one IT area that we
believe will achieve operational, financial and security benefits of which the
JEDI Cloud contract is a great example,” Gibson said.
The Industry Day event, held at the Sheraton Pentagon City
near the Pentagon, was open to the public. Hundreds of people, including
representatives from industry, academia and government, attended.
Changing the Way DoD Does Business
“We must embrace change,” Ellen M. Lord, the undersecretary
of defense acquisition and sustainment, said. “If we leverage commercially
available cloud solutions, we will have the foundational technology in place
that we need to deliver better software to our warfighters faster, with better
security, and at a lower cost, and that software will be easier to maintain,”
she said.
Lord said the initiative is the kind of innovation the
defense acquisition world needs.
“If we keep doing business the same old way, our software
will be outdated, it will cost far more than it needs to, we won't be able to
attract the best software talent, and we'll lose our technological edge,” she
said. “Change is uncomfortable, but as I tell our team all the time, we need to
get comfortable with being uncomfortable.”
Building a Better Now
The Defense Digital Service is leading the JEDI Cloud
acquisition and has worked throughout the Defense Department to stand up the
JEDI Program Office within the Office of the Chief Management Officer to
transform the way DoD buys, builds and makes decisions about technology.
Speaking at Industry Day, DDS Director Chris Lynch emphasized that JEDI Cloud
is additive -- it is a force multiplier rather than an end product solution, he
explained, and is critical to DoD’s efforts to accelerate adoption of cloud
infrastructure and platform services.
Embracing a commercial solution will allow DoD to innovate
at the speed of relevancy, improve lethality, and both identify and meet the
evolving requirements of the joint warfighter, Lynch noted.
“We get to take advantage of innovation that has not yet
come to us,” Lynch said. “We get to take advantage of the innovation that we
aspire to use.”
Lynch underscored the importance of operating at speed in
warfighting environments, where troops depend on information for making life
and death decisions.
Fighting and Winning the Nation’s Wars
Air Force Brig. Gen. David A. Krumm, the Joint Staff’s
deputy director for requirements, reminded attendees that the JEDI Cloud event
was held just across from Arlington National Cemetery. He encouraged them to
walk the hills of the cemetery and go through the rows of graves, noting they
will discover that some of those buried there are young service members.
“If we do this right, if we do this together, you and your
team will be responsible for making some of those end dates not as close [to
the birthdates],” he said. “You’ll be responsible for a few fewer tombstones up
there.”
More service members would make it home because they had the
critical information when they needed it in the battlespace, Krumm said. He
described the cloud undertaking as “not an IT contract,” but a way to change
how the department does business. “We're going to change the way that this
nation, its soldiers, its sailors, its Marines and its airmen fight and win our
nation's wars,” he said.
For the past quarter century, the department has had a
system in which data is secure, but also isolated and inaccessible to other
systems, the general noted.
“We need to take your commercial solutions and we need to
integrate them into the military,” he said. “We need to put them on a global
scale in both the unclassified and classified environment. That information has
to be available to the warfare on the tactical edge, not just the
headquarters.”
Global Enterprise, Millions of Users
Essye B. Miller, DoD’s acting chief information officer,
noted that the Defense Department now has 3.4 million users, about 4 million
endpoint devices, more than 1,700 data centers, and some 500 different cloud
initiatives. She stressed the security aspect of the commercial solution for
the cloud infrastructure.
“It is less about protecting the boundary of the network and
the physical limitations,” she said. “It's more about protecting the data and
exposing it to the individuals and functions who need it in a real-time basis.”
The project, she said, is about capturing best practices of
industry that can help the department.
“Cloud computing enables the department to consolidate
infrastructure, leverage IT commodity functions, eliminate functional
redundancies, while improving continuity of operations,” she said.
In September, DoD established the Cloud Executive Steering
Group to develop and execute a strategy to accelerate the adoption of cloud
architectures and cloud services with a focus on commercial solutions.
The department is using a tailored acquisition process to
acquire a modern enterprise cloud services solution that can support
unclassified, secret and top secret requirements. The planned contracting
action will be a full and open competition.
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