Thousands of applications pose additional challenges for the Department of Defense fully embracing the increasingly ubiquitous cloud computing platform, an official said March 13.
DoD will need to inventory its applications, figure out what servers they sit on and what platforms they use, and determine what functional component of the department they’re attached to (ex. logistics, command and control), Air Force Chief Technology Officer Frank Konieczny said at MeriTalk’s Data Center Brainstorm. Doing basic inventory–called “application rationalization”–will ensure that any change in IT infrastructure won’t affect delivery of the service. The process becomes increasingly complicated with the number of apps. He estimates the Air Force alone uses 5,000-8,000 applications.
“We can do scanning of a system really well–we can know the assets,” he said referring to the hardware connecting the network. Knowing what assets are running which applications is the difficult part, he said.
As they move out to bases, the apps proliferate even further. Konieczny thinks there may be 10-20 apps supporting fuel management–all of which run under the same name but have different technical specifications. Changing any one of them could lead to disruption and legal issues if the vendor fails to deliver it.
“If you put a regular logistics app out there [in the cloud] …and people expect things to be at a certain place, and the app fails, what do you do?” he said.
Connectivity and cost are also roadblocks the department must overcome. If an application is moved from an in-house server to a cloud server, you have to make sure the communication between the original location and the new server is strong, accounting for additional security measures.
“This is a problem people don’t realize. They say put it in the cloud and everything will work just fine,” he said. “Cost savings you may gain by pushing into a cloud environment may be offset by the cost of upgrading the communications.”
While the rationalization process could save long-term dollars, no funding has been designated for a program’s initial investment costs.
“All of the money that would be used in migration is in the program’s budget,” which is determined in the five-year Program Objective Memorandum (POM), Konieczny said. “We’d have to repurpose money if necessary, which is painful.”
Despite the complexity of cloud adoption, the Air Force has been working with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) on its milCloud offering. Konieczny said the Air Force has placed the first application on milCloud, which provides a baseline Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that DISA hopes will contribute to the Joint Information Environment (JIE). He did not specify what type of app it is, but he said the problems were as expected given that it is the first app in the environment.
To prevent the application proliferation problem in the future, the Air Force is asking developers to build all apps to work with several pre-determined platforms, he said.