Jeff Marshall, who took over in May as acting director of the Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) J9 Hosting and Compute Center (HaCC), explained this week how his organization is rethinking its approach to providing services through more of a hybrid cloud lens, and how it’s also gearing up for some retooling of its Stratus private cloud offering.
Speaking at an Aug. 6 Defense One event in Washington, Marshall talked about his brief tenure with DISA – he joined the organization in February of this year after working as director of global cloud enterprise services at Dell Technologies – and his impressions so far.
“It’s been going well,” Marshall said. “I feel like I’ve been able to take what I’ve learned out in the private sector – which is almost like from a technology and business operations perspective it’s almost about five years ahead of where we’re at in DISA with what we’re doing – so it feels very comfortable with where we’re at and what I’m able to bring to the table.”
On the subject of a hybrid cloud approach, Marshall talked about the Defense Department’s (DoD) existing Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract with multiple vendors, which he said “allows mission partners to come to us and be able to get into the cloud without having to do a lot of their own heavy lift to get that set up.”
While DISA’s first push for mission partners has been toward JWCC, Marshall said that “now that it’s been out there for a while, it’s time for us to start looking at [whether] public cloud [is] the right vehicle for every workload.”
To further that approach, “I have an office called the hybrid cloud broker office, and so we’re looking at that, and we’re looking at what the customers’ and what the mission partners’ challenges are,” he said.
“Maybe they’re already in AWS or Microsoft or Oracle or Google, and they’re realizing that for performance reasons, for data Ingress and egress reasons, and for security and compliance reasons, maybe not all the workload actually fits there anymore,” he said.
“So, now what we’re doing is we’re taking a more holistic approach, and we’re looking at cloud as a hybrid cloud environment, and we actually are touting that as part of this hybrid cloud broker initiative and office and space that we’re in, where we’re looking at, what are your challenges, what are your problem sets that you’re trying to solve in going to the cloud,” he said. “And with that, we’re then looking at helping to develop better solutions that are more tailored to the workload and to the capability needs of the warfighter and the mission partners.”
As a result, Marshall said, “we’re finding that sometimes JWCC and the public clouds is the right space for that workload, but other times we find that it’s actually private cloud in our Stratus offering that’s the right workload.”
Or sometimes, the answer is not the cloud at all, he indicated. “I know this is going to put some people out – even mainframe is the right workload vehicle for some people, and we actually have it,” Marshall said. “We actually do our own hosting with our own space for on-premise compute because there is a flexible option and sometimes that is needed by some folks in their workload still.”
On the Stratus front, Marshall said his office is “looking at a prototype of retooling it and making it a better private cloud offering.”
That thinking, he said, involves addressing concerns including “if you do need boundaries that the public cloud can’t provide you, if you do need performance that you can’t get from there, if you do need white-glove service [and] you can’t get it.”
“What we’re doing with Stratus is we’re actually looking at now prototyping a refresh of the infrastructure, and with that, it’s going to be able to give us the ability, within the next year or two, to be able to offer the same set of parameters that we can offer you with JWCC,” Marshall said.
“We’re going to be able to give you scalability, elasticity, and metering within that,” he said. “So, we’re there, we’re moving into that space, and we’re now starting to use the hybrid cloud broker office to go out to mission partners and get that demand signal to try and understand what do you have out there, and is it where it should be? Let us help you figure that out. Let us help you determine the metrics around that, and then when it’s ready, we can bring the workloads in that probably should be in a private environment for reasons.”
