Lockheed Martin [LMT] will complete a cloud pilot for an enterprise Air Force system that serves 800,000 users next month.
“It shows a major Air Force system and platform using cloud to lower operational costs, separate data to different security models, and–quite honestly–really helping drive the Air Force into the next phase,” said Angela Heise, Lockheed Martin vice president of Enterprise IT Solutions.
As part of its contract with the Air Force’s Global Combat Support System (GCSS), the company migrated the Air Force Portal along with its code and applications to the cloud. The portal serves as a central hub for the service–providing information ranging from status of supplies to employee benefits.
Lockheed Martin has been the prime contractor for GCSS since 1996. Heise said the cloud has been in the company’s plan for a while, but the vendors and technical offerings were finally mature enough to pilot this year.
“There’s been a lot of hype and talk about cloud for anyone who’s in IT. It’s becoming a real possibility now,” she said.
Among the concerns for making the move to cloud are procuring the services from cloud vendors and migrating applications to a different infrastructure. Heise said her team did not have problems with either issue.
The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment comprises both commercial and hybrid cloud. Less sensitive data is hosted via Amazon Web Services, while more sensitive data resides in the Defense Information Systems Agency’s private milCloud.
Heise said her team specializes in application migration as core competency, but they set reasonable expectations for the challenge of transferring the apps.
“We’ve prioritized the applications by, if you will, the simplicity of how easy or hard it is to migrate,” she said. “Especially these 200 plus apps–we have it down to a science.”
Heise said the technical challenges were “fairly insignificant” compared to establishing cloud policies and governance. In order to make the pilot cost effective, Lockheed Martin needed to ensure that all cloud services were being used and not exceeding what the Air Force needs. While she will not have more concrete figures until the pilot’s conclusion, Heise said she expects using cloud over traditional computing could save anywhere from 30 to 75 percent on operating costs.
The path forward following the pilot may provide the biggest hurdle to expanding the service’s use of the cloud, she said.
“The big challenge is going to be showing everybody the data, which I think will be compelling, and then convincing them of a roadmap,” she said.
Heise also intends to take the pilot’s findings beyond the Air Force.
“I’m hoping that this serves a role model not only for the Air Force but for the other DoD customers,” she said. “I would hope that they would be open for when we share our results that they would look into that for their own enterprise.”