The U.S. Army is expanding its cloud capabilities by adding new cloud service providers (CSPs) to its lineup and standing up a pilot project aimed at improving communication between the Department of Defense (DoD) and external partners, a senior Army official revealed on Tuesday.
At an AFCEA Luncheon Series event on Nov. 12, Heath Giesecke, director of the Army’s Enterprise Cloud Management Agency, outlined plans for a new pilot offering an alternative chat app for DoD and mission partners. The app will integrate with Azure’s Active Directory for identity management and operate across cloud environments, including Amazon and Azure.
“We’re doing identity control through [the application] tying all the way back into Azure from the Amazon side – so that’s a good capability we’re looking forward to,” said Giesecke. “[It] actually [gets] integrated all the way down to the soldier kit – kind of next-gen orator – out to the field, to be able to chat with a mission partner, a local LEO (law enforcement officer), an international partner, somebody who signs up.”
The pilot aligns with the Army’s focus on identity management across cloud platforms, Giesecke said. Practices include using the Azure directory as the main identity control system for various applications, including Army Google Workspaces.
“We don’t have many other mission apps that are exchanging data from one cloud provider to another – but identity we are,” said Giesecke. “We’re using a lot of our Azure kind of intra-ID space as the authoritative ID space for some of our offerings, like we’ll have our Army Google workspaces with a subset of, say, tens of thousands of users.”
The Army is also centralizing its cloud services and looking to add more CSPs to its network. Currently, the Army uses Amazon and Azure to host both controlled unclassified and classified information. When selecting new providers, Giesecke emphasized the importance of expertise, cost-efficiency, and return on investment.
The Army is also focusing on expanding cloud services across its decentralized network, especially in business mission areas. “The Army is very decentralized, so we’ve been attempting to centralize some more cloud offerings from the ACOMs (Army Commands) or the major commands across the Army, and we’re continuing to innovate and redesign some more landing zones,” said Giesecke.
Looking ahead, Giesecke highlighted plans to improve cloud cost management and data integrity for future tenants.
“We do have kind of a single pane glass for kind of FinOps [financial operations] …but right now we don’t actively go after how to optimize spend for them, or even data integrity actions for them – but it’s something we’re thinking about for the future,” said Giesecke.
