The Army plans to award a contract in September to a commercial computing company that will consolidate 11 of its physical data centers into a single data-storage cloud.
Under a three-year pilot program, the Army will grant one information technology (IT) firm access to servers at Redstone Arsenal so that the data stored there can be transferred to a “hybrid cloud” that will be managed both on- and offsite by the contractor.
Industry responses to a request for proposals (RFP) to perform the work are due July 19 and the Army plans to choose a winner in mid-September, Lt. Gen. Robert Farrell, the Army chief information officer, said Thursday at a forum hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army at its headquarters outside Washington, D.C.
“My intent is to create a hybrid portfolio for the Army to allow units to select where they would like to store their data,” Farrell said. “Not everything is going to move to the cloud.”
That hybrid cloud will be hosted by the commercial industry partner on Army installations and in a “mil-cloud” managed by the Defense Information Systems Agency offsite at contractor-operated sites.
There are 23 data centers at Redstone Arsenal, 11 of which are owned by the Army, Farrell said. The pilot cloud program will pull the applications from those 11 and “collapse” them into an Army cloud.
“This will be the first step for DoD and specifically the Army to move in this direction,” Farrell said. “There is a lot of coordinated effort that we still have to do. The first step is getting feedback from our industries on what they can provide. But internally this will be a first opportunity for us to certify a data center as cloud-ready.”
Redstone was chosen become it hosts a large number of data centers, Farrell said. Most of them have been recently upgraded and therefore can affordably and efficiently host the pilot program, he said. Though the program is a pilot, Farrell expects it to be the basis for migrating other data centers to the cloud and expanding the practice to other facilities. Fort Carson, Colo., Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Knox in Kentucky are under consideration as future cloud hosts, he said.
“This will be a proof of concept that we will draw lessons from and then look at enduring sites,” Farrell said. “I think once you start down that road, I think that will be an enduring action.”
Transitioning data storage to the cloud is one initiative in a larger drive to consolidate the Army’s and the Defense Department’s multitudinous computing networks into fewer systems that interoperate on a basic common architecture.
Another example is the migration of all Defense Department computers to Windows 10, a huge effort to baseline enterprise computers and tactical systems with the same, up-to-date operating system.
“We have too many separate, disparate networks that are all tied into the legacy system,” he said. “We have too many vulnerabilities to our environment and we have too many inefficient ways to manage it.”
Ultimately, the Army and its sister services will all operate within the Joint Information Environment where data can be shared up and down the chain of command and across services. It will include everything from fighter jets and tanks to desktop computers in the same operational computing environment that the Defense Department can keep an eye on, Ferrell said.
“It’s one infrastructure. It’s one security standard and it’s one architecture that will allow us…to harden the network,” he said.
The Army already has “migrated” 13 installations onto the joint regional security stack computing system, Ferrell said. By the end of the fiscal year, 19 installations should be running on the Joint Regional Security Stack (JRSS). At least 44 installations will operate on the joint servers by the end of fiscal 2017, he said.
It also is in the process of eliminating hard-wired telephones and establishing a computing system that will allow soldiers to work from anywhere rather than be tied to a cubicle in the Pentagon or a base. The transformational program has the underwhelming title of “Unified Capabilities” but will basically change how soldiers access information, including an Army-provided mobile device data service.
“We will take out all of the hard-wired phone systems, which in that case will be a cost savings,” Farrell said. “We will also untether the soldier from their workplace, meaning that wherever they are traveling with their instrument, they should…be able to access their data, video and be able to chat to higher headquarters and lower headquarters.”
“We have way too many separate and disparate networks within the Army,” Farrell said. “We’ve grown over time and now it’s time to put everyone on one common platform,” he added.