A Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) official said today that the agency’s ongoing pilot efforts to provide cloud services to military service branches outside the continental U.S. (OCONUS) are proceeding well thus far, but that the ultimate goal of the pilots – to make overseas cloud services easy to use for all warfighting use cases – still remains on the horizon.
Korie Seville – who serves in a dual-hatted role as the J9 HaC [hosting and compute] Senior Technical Advisor and the DISA Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Compute responsible for strategic technical direction of DISA HaC data center and cloud initiatives including the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) and zero trust – explained the current state of the OCONUS cloud service efforts at an event organized by GovCIO Media and Research.
DISA unveiled its OCONUS cloud service push in August 2023 by announcing that its Stratus private cloud solution was operational at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, marking a step forward in the agency’s work to establish a global cloud infrastructure. OCONUS Region for Stratus is just one element in DISA’s plan to spread OCONUS cloud services around the world.
Seville provided an update on the pilot efforts today, saying, “it’s funny because OCONUS cloud is not something you can buy … it’s really capabilities, it’s a suite of things that we can offer to allow an OCONUS user to take advantage of the scalability and elasticity the cloud provides.”
He said the pilots now underway encompass those “primarily in our joint operational edge project, and then our private cloud solution, which is Stratus, which we are pushing out to OCONUS as well.”
“Our goal is to not only test the waters of what operational edge cloud would look like, but also to test the waters of how do you maintain and manage a global infrastructure that is delivered in the way the cloud is, which is central control, central capability, and basically a level of agnosticism where, if you’re providing a service, you may not know where it is as a user, but you’re just using it and it’s available everywhere you go,” the DISA official said.
“These pilots are really dedicated to solving that problem set while also bringing an emergent capability to the warfighter at the speed of their mission,” he continued.
“I would say that the pilots have been going well, we’ve definitely learned a lot in how delivery at scale of commercial cloud and private cloud OCONUS has to be done,” Seville said.
“What we’re finding is that the tactical use cases are relatively simple in regards to you’re putting compute in their hands,” he said.
“I think the challenge comes into now we want to aggregate that at an operational level,” Seville said.
“How do we do that and maintain some level of central management control capability and how do we share that across departments, how do we share that across branches and services?
“Because today everybody’s using a little bit of a different thing, and so that is part of the operational requirements for OCONUS cloud is to start to join those things together,” he said. “I think that’s one of the things that the pilots are really pushing forward.”
Looking forward, the DISA official said, “I think the North Star that we’re all working towards is basically replication of what the department terms as cloud – which is probably one of the most stretched and manipulated definitions I think in the department – but we’re trying to deliver what we believe to be the tenets of cloud in every hosting capability that we can provide – so elasticity, scalability, and that agnosticism of use everywhere.”
“I think the future of this really turns into getting to that North Star of a mesh of capabilities that are available … to all of our warfighting use cases and able to be delivered to the customer in a way that is easy, and it basically incentivizes use versus having a high barrier of entry,” he said.
“I think we are a ways off, I will say that upfront, [but] we’re continuing to learn, continuing to drive this innovation forward,” Seville said.
He added that DISA has benefited from having “great partnerships with the DoD CIO and others as part of our joint operational edge capabilities and our private cloud capabilities. We’ve actually even had good partnership with the intelligence community and other federal agencies.”
“The nice part of this is it’s showing that the department can come together to make a use case available to the warfighter,” Seville said. “It’s starting to I think transcend a little bit of politics, a little bit of that bureaucracy and we’re really saying, ‘Hey, this is an actual mission need, we need to get this done. Let’s come together and find a way.’”
