DISA officials on Thursday said partners need to move more rapidly to the new milCloud service, while urging industry partners to ensure applications are cloud-ready to facilitate faster migration.
Officials said support agencies headquartered outside the Pentagon are particularly hesitant to shift over to milCloud, facing uncertainty over the range of cloud services and a lack of automated applications.
“Migrate right now. We have a capability that’s up and running. We have data production applications that are up and running,”Jason Martin, DISA services directorate executive said.
Martin said DISA has made a concerted effort to push fourth estate agencies towards milCloud to speed up the migration process, with the agency now looking to industry to ensure their DoD partners will be able to use their applications after transitioning to the new system.
MilCloud is the DISA-provided cloud service operated by General Dynamics [GD] Information Technology.
Terry Carpenter, director of DISA’s Services Development Directorate, said there is an opportunity now for industry to assist with this effort by ensuring their applications are configured for the cloud to assist fourth estate agencies with the transition.
“There are those applications where you really do need to look at the architecture. You need to look at the way in which you’re managing the code. You need to look at the way you’re managing your cloud infrastructure,” Carpenter said. “The hard part is putting all those pieces together, understanding the amount of work and time it takes things onto the cloud.”
Steve Wallace, a DISA systems innovation scientist, said investments should primarily be made in automation to ensure critical DoD applications are suitable for the current version of milCloud and its future iterations.
“Move to milCloud right now. It’s there right now. It’s available. Move there now, do that automation and containerization. Then you can be portable,” Wallace said. “Make that investment upfront, versus just repeatedly trying to rush into the same brick wall and having to relearn the same lesson again and again.”