The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is preparing to roll out a pilot version of its Olympus managed cloud environment in September, designed to offer advanced management capabilities specifically for Pentagon cloud users.
Olympus, which DISA first announced in March, streamlines the deployment of commercial cloud solutions and enables the construction of robust cloud environments.
In an interview with MeriTalk, Dave Lago, DISA’s J9 Hosting and Compute (HaC) Olympus Directorate product manager, shared insights into the eagerly anticipated launch of the Olympus managed cloud environment, which promises to ease cloud management for Pentagon users.
MeriTalk: What critical need prompted DISA to develop Olympus?
Lago: It’s simple. Our customers kept asking us for it. They want DISA to be in this space, to have a managed platform in the commercial cloud. The Department of Defense (DoD) has done a great job, and they have a great ecosystem of cloud platforms like Cloud One and Platform One, but we still think there is a place for us.
MeriTalk: What capabilities will the Olympus platform offer DoD cloud users?
Lago: We have two major offerings within Olympus: management and common services.
The management platform is going to look like a classic engineering platform. We manage the guardrails and underlying infrastructure in the environment, and you manage your application. The user would get their account through one of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) cloud service providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle – and we will manage it on their behalf.
The second offering is common services, and those are the services needed for any cloud environment to be successful. Olympus supports integration with various tools and systems such as the DevSecOps platform Vulcan for software development and DISA’s Stratus private cloud offering.
At DISA we bring our differentiators to market like JWCC, the disparate data centers, the Defense Information Systems Network, secure cloud computing architecture, the boundary cloud access points, the global directory for CAC authentication, we have Thunderdome for zero trust, and so much more. Olympus will also have hybrid connectivity to DISA’s data centers globally.
There is a lot of customer interest in the integration of all those services through an offering like Olympus.
MeriTalk: What challenges has the team faced in attempting to roll out this platform?
Lago: Multicloud, the fact of offering all four cloud providers is a big challenge. There is a lot of complexity when you are doing multicloud, but the good news is that we have made investments in other areas like DoD Cloud Infrastructure as Code, which we do in partnership with the cloud service providers, and it has helped us to bridge that gap and bonus off our experiences there.
MeriTalk: Is there a considerable interest in Olympus by DoD components and military services?
Lago: Definitely! DISA currently has a memorandum of understanding with a beta tester, who I am not at liberty to disclose. But we also have a waitlist with several organizations signing up for our beta test phase, and anyone at the department interested in beta testing Olympus can contact our team at the HaC.
There is broad interest in Olympus.
Our plan for Olympus plays off of the work we did to stand up our Vulcan DevSecOps platform. We are going to make a modest investment to quickly stand up a capability and get a customer base that is willing to pay for the service – in fiscal year (FY) 2026. Then we are going to expand and move that offering over time based on the feedback we receive from our customers.
MeriTalk: What does the roadmap for DISA look like with Olympus?
Lago: Currently, the Olympus platform is under development and beta testing for the minimum viable product, which is going to be Microsoft Azure, [and] will be completed at the end of FY2024.
We will be doing beta tests throughout FY2025 across all four of the cloud service providers. We have already seen so much interest in Olympus, which is why having this extended beta test is critical to understanding our customers’ needs and how we shaped Olympus into a service they want to consume.
Then in FY2026, we plan to move to the Defense Working Capital Fund, which is a fee-for-service model.
